Ice construction has been used for practical and artistic purposes for thousands of years. In the past few decades, computer numerical control (CNC) ice sculpting has become a well-established industry, with many companies producing ice sculptures for corporate events. This…

Semiparametric efficient methods in causal inference have been developed to robustly and efficiently estimate causal parameters. As in general causal estimation, the methods rely on a set of mathematical assumptions that translate into requirements of causal knowledge and confounder identification.…

Neurons in sensory areas of our nervous system respond to sensory stimuli, but they are also modulated at the same time by both feed-forward and feed-back mechanisms. The history of prior sensory stimulation shapes the way neurons respond to future…

A public oral defense of the written dissertation is mandatory for completion of the doctorate in most North American universities, yet how students experience it has rarely been documented. This study examined how a group of Canadian education PhD candidates…

In this thesis, I discuss how practitioners of martial arts in the Republican era of China were engaged in a process of reinventing what embodied the field of martial arts during a time when physical culture was treated as an…

Abu Nasr Qursawi is a seminal figure in the history of the Muslim communities of the Russian Empire. Controversial in his own time, as well as posthumously, he came to be seen as an inspiration for Jadidism, the modernist Muslim…

Shotgun proteomic technology is a powerful characterization tool that can be used to investigate the global status of an organism at the molecular level. This dissertation presents the shotgun proteomic analysis of Clostridium acetobutylicum which is capable of converting different…

Zellweger spectrum disorder (ZSD) is due to defects in any one of 13 PEX proteins, encoded by PEX genes, which are required for peroxisome biogenesis. ZSD features neurologic, hepatic and renal abnormalities; however, one common mutation, PEX1-p.Gly843Asp (G843D), confers a…

Having a complete knowledge about average traffic rates on different links in a network is highly desirable for network operators, particularly when performing tasks such as capacity planning and traffic engineering, or when making decisions on network redesigning.In this thesis,…

Telecommunication structures are essential components of communication and post-disaster networks that must remain operational after a design-level of earthquake. Although many studies have been done to evaluate the response of these structures when subjected to wind and earthquakes, almost all…