The current study seeks to explore the washback effects of the CET (College English Test) on teacher beliefs, interpretations and practices, and in particular seeks to discover the way the 'teacher factor' is manifested in the washback phenomenon. It also…

The roots of the human desire for agelessness and the want to surpass the limitations of the human condition go deep into the reaches of history. The religious disposition for immortality is ancient. However, the concept of transcending human nature…

This study evaluated the outcome and process of a peer education program for sex workers, with social support proposed as an organizing framework. Program outcomes were assessed through a pre-post design without comparison group. Sex workers naïve to peer education…

Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes are one of the most powerful classes of error-control codes known to date. These codes have been considered for many recent digital communication applications. In this dissertation, we propose stochastic decoding of state-of-the-art LDPC codes and…

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…