This dissertation describes my work as an educational consultant working with four school principals during a two and a half year period. My original intention was to develop a protocol to help principals in their work. As the study progressed,…

Previous work has shown that expected value of reward associated with a reach modulates neurons in the medial intraparietal cortex (MIP) and that this reward signal can be decoded. In this study, we investigated the reliability of reward coding in…

This thesis examines whether transitioning from current co-management approaches to an adaptive co-management approach would resolve some of the problems experienced in current treaty negotiations contexts between Canadian First Nations and the state government. It first identifies how adaptive co-management…

Efficient and accurate numerical simulation methods for the damage tolerance analysis and fatigue life prediction of fibre reinforced polymers are in high demand in industry. Problems arise in the development of such a simulation method due to the limitations from…

The purpose of the present thesis was to investigate the role of specific cognitive representations in some of people's important life outcomes. Episodic memories were chosen as one type of specific cognitive representation and psychological need satisfaction was identified as…

Spoken dialogue systems are gaining popularity with improvements in speech recognition technologies. Dialogue systems have been modeled effectively using Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), achieving improvements in robustness. However, past research on POMDP-based dialogue systems usually assumes that the…

This thesis presents a theoretical and experimental study of the nonlinear behaviour of analog synthesizers' effects. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate and complete current research on nonlinear system modelling, both in and out of the field of…

My dissertation strives to understand the conditions under which peaceoperations in intra-state wars succeed or fail. I address two main questions: Whatis peace operation success, and what contributes to such an outcome? I define thesuccess of a peace operation based…

Energy detection has emerged as a prime technique for wideband spectrum sensing in cognitive radio applications. Much of the present research in the area of energy detection assumes that the occupancy of any particular frequency subband is independent of the…

Social scientists have been interested in studying families of children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) for decades. Theoretically, parenting occurs in a family context. Yet, little is known about this relationship from an empirical standpoint among parents of children with NDD.…