St. Catharines and District Chamber of Commerce records, 1943-1992, n.d.

The St. Catharines and District Chamber of Commerce merged with the Thorold Chamber of Commerce in 2006. In 2012, they joined a region wide Chamber, becoming part of the Greater Niagara Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber is a "is a non-partisan, non-sectarian association of businesses, groups and individuals who support business growth and effective government fostering a sustainable and vibrant Niagara."

Exploring the Design Process and Components of an Elementary Literacy Guide in an Ontario School Board Initiative

The skill to identify and use best practices in literacy to promote achievement for students of all abilities cannot be underestimated by elementary educators. This qualitative case study investigates 1 year of a literacy initiative for primary and junior educators organized by a southern Ontario school board. The goals of the initiative were to design a literacy guide for teachers while building teacher capacity with literacy practices. Data were culled and analyzed from an examination of the guide, the meetings’ field notes and artifacts, as well as interviews with the educators at the end of the year. Several themes from the results emerged. The educators perceived the design process as unclear but the collaborative components were deemed valuable. The guide’s incompletion led to mixed reactions from the educators about the guide and its structure. Overall, the first year of the 3-year initiative acted as a catalyst for professional learning on literacy. The findings of this study accentuated the value of training educators to use empirical research to support their practices and professional knowledge. Also, the significance of promoting strong leadership with a comprehensive layout consisting of coherent tangible goals for professional development is highlighted.

Intégration du concept de capacité de support d’un plan d’eau aux apports en phosphore à l’aménagement du territoire au Québec : Réalité ou utopie?

Ce mémoire a comme objectif de présenter une revue de la littérature et une analyse comparative des différents modèles existants pour le calcul de la capacité de support d’un plan d’eau aux apports en phosphore. Ce document a aussi pour but d’évaluer les différentes options pour l’utilisation de ce genre d’outil au Québec, ainsi que d’amorcer une réflexion sur les applications possibles de ce concept au niveau local, en lien avec l’aménagement du territoire des bassins versants. L’analyse comparative des modèles théoriques, combinée à la réflexion d’acteurs clés impliqués actuellement dans un processus qui consiste à tester leur utilisation dans les Laurentides au Québec, a permis de mettre en relief l’importance de calibrer les modèles régionalement. De plus, certains avantages semblent résider dans l’utilisation d’un modèle de nature empirique afin d’effectuer les prédictions sur les apports naturels et totaux en phosphore pour les lacs de cette région. Par contre, l’utilisation d’une approche de type « bilan de masse », s’avère tout de même indispensable afin de relativiser l’importance des différents apports anthropiques en phosphore du bassin versant. Dans l’avenir, l’utilisation de tels modèles permettra possiblement de justifier certaines mesures restrictives au développement des bassins versants, qui pourront s’insérer parmi les outils d’urbanisme actuels. Ce sont principalement les municipalités qui détiennent les pouvoirs nécessaires afin d’intégrer les prescriptions découlant de ce genre d’analyse à l’aménagement du territoire des bassins versants. Plusieurs outils d’urbanisme, tels que les plans d’aménagement d’ensemble (PAE) ou bien les règlements de zonage et de lotissement, semblent donner assez de latitude afin de permettre aux municipalités d’intervenir en ce sens. Toutefois, les modèles de capacité de support ne pourront pas être utilisés afin de calculer un nombre précis d’habitations qu’il est possible de construire dans le bassin versant d’un lac.

The Power and Promise of Developmental Systems Theory

I argue that it is time for many feminists to rethink their attitudes towards evolutionary biology, not because feminists have been wrong to be deeply sceptical about many of its claims, both explicit and implicit, but because biology itself has changed. A new appreciation for the importance of development in biology has become mainstream and a new ontology, associated with developmental systems theory (DST), has been introduced over the last two decades. This turn challenges some of the features of evolutionary biology that have most troubled feminists. DST undermines the idea of biologicales sence and challenges both nature /nurture and nature/culture distinctions. Freed from these conceptual constraints, evolutionary biology no longer poses the problems that have justified feminist scepticism. Indeed, feminists have already found useful applications for DST and I argue that they should expand their use of DST to support more radical and wide-ranging political theories.

Resilience and Individualized Community Integration Interventions for Persons with Traumatic Brain Injuries

Investigators, caregivers, administrators and service users in the field of rehabilitation are increasingly interested in the concept of resilience, but the literature has very little to offer on interventions aimed at supporting the resilience of persons and their loved ones. This article describes the Personnalized Accompagnement Community Integration (ICII), which is intended to support the resilience of persons with moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). An ICII implementation is currently underway and is expected to support social participation and stimulate the resilience of persons with TBIs. It is based on four frames of reference: community integration founded on the person’s perception of their community integration, the ecosystemic model, the handicap production process (HPP) model, and the goal-setting process. ICII adopts an intervention perspective centered on the life plan of the person with a TBI.

L’utilisation de la polarimétrie radar et de la décomposition de Touzi pour la caractérisation et la classification des physionomies végétales des milieux humides : le cas du Lac Saint-Pierre.

Les milieux humides remplissent plusieurs fonctions écologiques d’importance et contribuent à la biodiversité de la faune et de la flore. Même s’il existe une reconnaissance croissante sur l’importante de protéger ces milieux, il n’en demeure pas moins que leur intégrité est encore menacée par la pression des activités humaines. L’inventaire et le suivi systématique des milieux humides constituent une nécessité et la télédétection est le seul moyen réaliste d’atteindre ce but. L’objectif de cette thèse consiste à contribuer et à améliorer la caractérisation des milieux humides en utilisant des données satellites acquises par des radars polarimétriques en bande L (ALOS-PALSAR) et C (RADARSAT-2). Cette thèse se fonde sur deux hypothèses (chap. 1). La première hypothèse stipule que les classes de physionomies végétales, basées sur la structure des végétaux, sont plus appropriées que les classes d’espèces végétales car mieux adaptées au contenu informationnel des images radar polarimétriques. La seconde hypothèse stipule que les algorithmes de décompositions polarimétriques permettent une extraction optimale de l’information polarimétrique comparativement à une approche multipolarisée basée sur les canaux de polarisation HH, HV et VV (chap. 3). En particulier, l’apport de la décomposition incohérente de Touzi pour l’inventaire et le suivi de milieux humides est examiné en détail. Cette décomposition permet de caractériser le type de diffusion, la phase, l’orientation, la symétrie, le degré de polarisation et la puissance rétrodiffusée d’une cible à l’aide d’une série de paramètres extraits d’une analyse des vecteurs et des valeurs propres de la matrice de cohérence. La région du lac Saint-Pierre a été sélectionnée comme site d’étude étant donné la grande diversité de ses milieux humides qui y couvrent plus de 20 000 ha. L’un des défis posés par cette thèse consiste au fait qu’il n’existe pas de système standard énumérant l’ensemble possible des classes physionomiques ni d’indications précises quant à leurs caractéristiques et dimensions. Une grande attention a donc été portée à la création de ces classes par recoupement de sources de données diverses et plus de 50 espèces végétales ont été regroupées en 9 classes physionomiques (chap. 7, 8 et 9). Plusieurs analyses sont proposées pour valider les hypothèses de cette thèse (chap. 9). Des analyses de sensibilité par diffusiogramme sont utilisées pour étudier les caractéristiques et la dispersion des physionomies végétales dans différents espaces constitués de paramètres polarimétriques ou canaux de polarisation (chap. 10 et 12). Des séries temporelles d’images RADARSAT-2 sont utilisées pour approfondir la compréhension de l’évolution saisonnière des physionomies végétales (chap. 12). L’algorithme de la divergence transformée est utilisé pour quantifier la séparabilité entre les classes physionomiques et pour identifier le ou les paramètres ayant le plus contribué(s) à leur séparabilité (chap. 11 et 13). Des classifications sont aussi proposées et les résultats comparés à une carte existante des milieux humide du lac Saint-Pierre (14). Finalement, une analyse du potentiel des paramètres polarimétrique en bande C et L est proposé pour le suivi de l’hydrologie des tourbières (chap. 15 et 16). Les analyses de sensibilité montrent que les paramètres de la 1re composante, relatifs à la portion dominante (polarisée) du signal, sont suffisants pour une caractérisation générale des physionomies végétales. Les paramètres des 2e et 3e composantes sont cependant nécessaires pour obtenir de meilleures séparabilités entre les classes (chap. 11 et 13) et une meilleure discrimination entre milieux humides et milieux secs (chap. 14). Cette thèse montre qu’il est préférable de considérer individuellement les paramètres des 1re, 2e et 3e composantes plutôt que leur somme pondérée par leurs valeurs propres respectives (chap. 10 et 12). Cette thèse examine également la complémentarité entre les paramètres de structure et ceux relatifs à la puissance rétrodiffusée, souvent ignorée et normalisée par la plupart des décompositions polarimétriques. La dimension temporelle (saisonnière) est essentielle pour la caractérisation et la classification des physionomies végétales (chap. 12, 13 et 14). Des images acquises au printemps (avril et mai) sont nécessaires pour discriminer les milieux secs des milieux humides alors que des images acquises en été (juillet et août) sont nécessaires pour raffiner la classification des physionomies végétales. Un arbre hiérarchique de classification développé dans cette thèse constitue une synthèse des connaissances acquises (chap. 14). À l’aide d’un nombre relativement réduit de paramètres polarimétriques et de règles de décisions simples, il est possible d’identifier, entre autres, trois classes de bas marais et de discriminer avec succès les hauts marais herbacés des autres classes physionomiques sans avoir recours à des sources de données auxiliaires. Les résultats obtenus sont comparables à ceux provenant d’une classification supervisée utilisant deux images Landsat-5 avec une exactitude globale de 77.3% et 79.0% respectivement. Diverses classifications utilisant la machine à vecteurs de support (SVM) permettent de reproduire les résultats obtenus avec l’arbre hiérarchique de classification. L’exploitation d’une plus forte dimensionalitée par le SVM, avec une précision globale maximale de 79.1%, ne permet cependant pas d’obtenir des résultats significativement meilleurs. Finalement, la phase de la décomposition de Touzi apparaît être le seul paramètre (en bande L) sensible aux variations du niveau d’eau sous la surface des tourbières ouvertes (chap. 16). Ce paramètre offre donc un grand potentiel pour le suivi de l’hydrologie des tourbières comparativement à la différence de phase entre les canaux HH et VV. Cette thèse démontre que les paramètres de la décomposition de Touzi permettent une meilleure caractérisation, de meilleures séparabilités et de meilleures classifications des physionomies végétales des milieux humides que les canaux de polarisation HH, HV et VV. Le regroupement des espèces végétales en classes physionomiques est un concept valable. Mais certaines espèces végétales partageant une physionomie similaire, mais occupant un milieu différent (haut vs bas marais), ont cependant présenté des différences significatives quant aux propriétés de leur rétrodiffusion.

Identification of a new cell line permissive to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus infection and replication which is phenotypically distinct from MARC-145 cell line

Background Airborne transmitted pathogens, such as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV), need to interact with host cells of the respiratory tract in order to be able to enter and disseminate in the host organism. Pulmonary alveolar macrophages (PAM) and MA104 derived monkey kidney MARC-145 cells are known to be permissive to PRRSV infection and replication and are the most studied cells in the literature. More recently, new cell lines developed to study PRRSV have been genetically modified to make them permissive to the virus. The SJPL cell line origin was initially reported to be epithelial cells of the respiratory tract of swine. Thus, the goal of this study was to determine if SJPL cells could support PRRSV infection and replication in vitro. Results The SJPL cell growth was significantly slower than MARC-145 cell growth. The SJPL cells were found to express the CD151 protein but not the CD163 and neither the sialoadhesin PRRSV receptors. During the course of the present study, the SJPL cells have been reported to be of monkey origin. Nevertheless, SJPL cells were found to be permissive to PRRSV infection and replication even if the development of the cytopathic effect was delayed compared to PRRSV-infected MARC-145 cells. Following PRRSV replication, the amount of infectious viral particles produced in SJPL and MARC-145 infected cells was similar. The SJPL cells allowed the replication of several PRRSV North American strains and were almost efficient as MARC-145 cells for virus isolation. Interestingly, PRRSV is 8 to 16 times more sensitive to IFNα antiviral effect in SJPL cell in comparison to that in MARC-145 cells. PRRSV induced an increase in IFNβ mRNA and no up regulation of IFNα mRNA in both infected cell types. In addition, PRRSV induced an up regulation of IFNγ and TNF-α mRNAs only in infected MARC-145 cells. Conclusions In conclusion, the SJPL cells are permissive to PRRSV. In addition, they are phenotypically different from MARC-145 cells and are an additional tool that could be used to study PRRSV pathogenesis mechanisms in vitro.

2D, 3D and 4D active compound delivery in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine

Recent advances in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine have shown that controlling cells microenvironment during growth is a key element to the development of successful therapeutic system. To achieve such control, researchers have first proposed the use of polymeric scaffolds that were able to support cellular growth and, to a certain extent, favor cell organization and tissue structure. With nowadays availability of a large pool of stem cell lines, such approach has appeared to be rather limited since it does not offer the fine control of the cell micro-environment in space and time (4D). Therefore, researchers are currently focusing their efforts on developing strategies that include active compound delivery systems in order to add a fourth dimension to the design of 3D scaffolds. This review will focus on recent concepts and applications of 2D and 3D techniques that have been used to control the load and release of active compounds used to promote cell differentiation and proliferation in or out of a scaffold. We will first present recent advances in the design of 2D polymeric scaffolds and the different techniques that have been used to deposit molecular cues and cells in a controlled fashion. We will continue presenting the recent advances made in the design of 3D scaffolds based on hydrogels as well as polymeric fibers and we will finish by presenting some of the research avenues that are still to be explored.

Statistical model based 3D shape prediction of postoperative trunks for non-invasive scoliosis surgery planning

One of the major concerns of scoliosis patients undergoing surgical treatment is the aesthetic aspect of the surgery outcome. It would be useful to predict the postoperative appearance of the patient trunk in the course of a surgery planning process in order to take into account the expectations of the patient. In this paper, we propose to use least squares support vector regression for the prediction of the postoperative trunk 3D shape after spine surgery for adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. Five dimensionality reduction techniques used in conjunction with the support vector machine are compared. The methods are evaluated in terms of their accuracy, based on the leave-one-out cross-validation performed on a database of 141 cases. The results indicate that the 3D shape predictions using a dimensionality reduction obtained by simultaneous decomposition of the predictors and response variables have the best accuracy.

Synthesis, characterization and catalytic activity of Nd203 supported V205 catalysts

A series of rare-earth neodymia supported vanadium oxide catalysts with various V205 loadings ranging from 3 to 15 wt.% were prepared by the wet impregnation method using ammonium metavanadate as the vanadium precursor. The nature of vanadia species formed on the support surface is characterized hy a series of different physicochemical techniques like X-ray diffraction (XRD). Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). BET surface area, diffuse reflectance UV-vis spectroscopy (DR UV-vis), thermal analysis (TG-DTG/DTA) and SEM. The acidity of the prepared systems were verified by the stepwise temperature programmed desorprion of ammonia (NH3-TPD) and found that the total acidity gets increased with the percentage of vanadia loading. XRD and FT1R results shows the presence of surface dispersed vanadyl species at lower loadings and the formation of higher vanadate species as the percentage composition of vanadia is increased above 9 wt.%. The low surface area of the support. calcination temperature and the percentage of vanadia loading are found to influence the formation of higher vanadia species. The catalytic activity of the V205-Nd203 catalysts was probed in the liquid phase hydroxylation of phenol and the result show that the present catalysts are active at lower vanadia concentrations.

Studies on Fuzzy Matroitls and Related Topics

The doctoral thesis focuses on the Studies on fuzzy Matroids and related topics.Since the publication of the classical paper on fuzzy sets by L. A. Zadeh in 1965.the theory of fuzzy mathematics has gained more and more recognition from many researchers in a wide range of scientific fields. Among various branches of pure and applied mathematics, convexity was one of the areas where the notion of fuzzy set was applied. Many researchers have been involved in extending the notion of abstract convexity to the broader framework of fuzzy setting. As a result, a number of concepts have been formulated and explored. However. many concepts are yet to be fuzzified. The main objective of this thesis was to extend some basic concepts and results in convexity theory to the fuzzy setting. The concept like matroids, independent structures. classical convex invariants like Helly number, Caratheodoty number, Radon number and Exchange number form an important area of study in crisp convexity theory. In this thesis, we try to generalize some of these concepts to the fuzzy setting. Finally, we have defined different types of fuzzy matroids derived from vector spaces and discussed some of their properties.

Paper industry in Kerala: An evaluation of labour absorption,capacity utilisation, and environmental pollution

Paper industry is one of the oldest and largest industries in Kerala. Despite the developments in the industry in terms of growth in output , value added and employment generation, many of the units face grave problems. Irrespective of the size of the plant, the problems of the industry are general in nature. The problems are galore in the supply, not the demand side. Amomg the problems, the important ones are: raw material scarcity, energy deficiency and obsolete technology. Further, the industry is subject to many controls by the Government — price control, product control and raw materials control — which result in the dwindling of profits and investments. Equally important are the reservations against the industry for polluting the environment byeffluent disposal on the one hand and affecting ecological balance by depleting the existing forest on the other. Apart from the large, medium and small pulp and paper mills, there are about 30 hand made paper units in Kerala which can be categorised as village and cottage industry. Almost all of these units began at the initiative and support of Khadi and Village Industries Commission. The primary purpose of these units is employment generation, and not profit making. Currently many of these units are in the red and many others are on the verge of closure. Therefore, a separate analysis of the growth performance, and problems and prospects of the hand made paper industry has also been attempted. It is analysed separately because of the very small size of the hand made paper units

Prediction of Key Symptoms of Learning Disabilities in School-Age Children Using Rough Sets

This paper highlights the prediction of learning disabilities (LD) in school-age children using rough set theory (RST) with an emphasis on application of data mining. In rough sets, data analysis start from a data table called an information system, which contains data about objects of interest, characterized in terms of attributes. These attributes consist of the properties of learning disabilities. By finding the relationship between these attributes, the redundant attributes can be eliminated and core attributes determined. Also, rule mining is performed in rough sets using the algorithm LEM1. The prediction of LD is accurately done by using Rosetta, the rough set tool kit for analysis of data. The result obtained from this study is compared with the output of a similar study conducted by us using Support Vector Machine (SVM) with Sequential Minimal Optimisation (SMO) algorithm. It is found that, using the concepts of reduct and global covering, we can easily predict the learning disabilities in children

A System for Offline Recognition of Handwritten Characters in Malayalam Script

In this paper, we propose a handwritten character recognition system for Malayalam language. The feature extraction phase consists of gradient and curvature calculation and dimensionality reduction using Principal Component Analysis. Directional information from the arc tangent of gradient is used as gradient feature. Strength of gradient in curvature direction is used as the curvature feature. The proposed system uses a combination of gradient and curvature feature in reduced dimension as the feature vector. For classification, discriminative power of Support Vector Machine (SVM) is evaluated. The results reveal that SVM with Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel yield the best performance with 96.28% and 97.96% of accuracy in two different datasets. This is the highest accuracy ever reported on these datasets

Design and Finite Element Analysis of Hybrid Stepper Motor for Spacecraft Applications

This paper presents the design and analysis of a 400-step hybrid stepper motor for spacecraft applications. The design of the hybrid stepper motor for achieving a specific performance requires the choice of appropriate tooth geometry. In this paper, a detailed account of the results of two-dimensional finite-element (FE) analysis conducted with different tooth shapes such as square and trapezoidal, is presented. The use of % more corresponding increase in detent torque and distorted static torque profile. For the requirements of maximum torque density, less-detent torque, and better positional accuracy and smooth static torque profile, different pitch slotting with equal tooth width has to be provided. From the various FE models subjected to analysis trapezoidal teeth configuration with unequal tooth pitch on the stator and rotor is found to be the best configuration and is selected for fabrication. The designed motor is fabricated and the experimental results is compared with the FE results