L’Exploitation, la Manipulation et la Destruction des Métis et les Autres Nations Autochtones: le Projet Colonial Franco-Catholique dans L’Ouest Canadien (1900-1950)

Ma thèse est une analyse du projet colonial franco-catholique dans l’Ouest canadien, entre 1900 et 1950, et ses conséquences pour les Métis et les autres Nations Autochtones. Je prouve que ce projet est un exemple du settler colonialism qui contribue au génocide des peuples Autochtones. Le settler colonialism est défini comme la destruction des peuples Autochtones et leur remplacement avec des sociétés coloniales. Inscrit dans cette mentalité coloniale, le projet colonial franco-catholique veut assimiler les Métis pour que leur identité soit remplacée par celle des Canadiens français. Leur assimilation mènera à la réussite de la colonisation de l’Ouest par l’Église catholique et ses fidèles. Cependant, cette assimilation est vraiment la destruction identitaire des Métis. Leur identité est réduite à deux éléments qui soutiennent la vision coloniale de l’Église et de la société dans l’Ouest : parler français et être de foi catholique. Rien d’autre est possible. Je montre que les religieux franco-catholiques imposent aux Métis la croyance qu’ils n’existent que pour servir la cause française. Leur vie hors de cet objectif n’a aucune valeur. Leurs identité, culture et histoire sont violemment rejetées et détruites parce qu’elles constituent des menaces au projet. Non seulement la colonisation des Métis est nécessaire pour la réussite du projet, mais les écoles résidentielles sont également présentées comme essentielles. En plus de sauver les âmes sauvages de leurs vies païennes, elles sont conçues comme des institutions franco-catholiques qui servent l’Église et la société. Elles sont des outils qui soutiennent la réussite du projet colonial franco-catholique en dépit des attaques par les anglophones. Cette thèse contribue à recadrer l’histoire canadienne-française, qui encore aujourd’hui affirme que les francophones ne sont pas des colonisateurs et qu’ils n’ont pas fait de mal lorsqu’ils se sont installés dans l’Ouest. En réalité, la francophonie du passé et celle du présent sont construites sur le principe du setter colonialism, de la destruction et du remplacement. Le projet colonial franco-catholique est génocidaire.My thesis is an analysis of the French-Catholic colonial project in Western Canada, between 1900 and 1950, and its consequences for Métis and other Indigenous Nations. I demonstrate that this project is an example of settler colonialism, which contributed to the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism is defined as the destruction of Indigenous Nations and their replacement with colonial societies. Inscribed in this colonial mentality, the French-Catholic colonial project aims to assimilate the Métis for their identity to be replaced by that of French Canadians. Their assimilation would contribute to the colonization of the West by the Catholic Church and its followers. However, this assimilation is really the destruction of Métis identity. Their identity is reduced to two elements that support the colonial vision of Church and society in the West: speaking French and being of the Catholic faith. Nothing else exists. I show that French-Catholic missionaries impose the belief that the Métis only exist to serve the French cause. Their lives outside this purpose have no value. Their identity, culture and history are violently rejected and destroyed because they are threats to the project. Not only is the colonization of the Métis necessary to the success of the project, but Indian residential schools are also presented as essential. In addition to rescuing savage souls from their pagan ways, they are conceived as French-Catholic institutions that serve the Church and society. They are tools that support the success of the Frech-Catholic colonial project despite attacks by Anglophones. This thesis helps to reframe French-Canadian history, which still asserts that francophones were not colonizers and did no harm when they colonized the West. In reality, la francophonie of the past and present is built on the principle of setter colonialism, destruction and replacement. The French-Catholic colonial project in the West is genocidal

Lightning Artist Toolkit: A Hand-Drawn Volumetric Animation Pipeline

This research contributes a set of methods for freely integrating live-action volumetric video with hand-drawn volumetric animation. The Kinect, the first consumer depth camera, arrived in 2010; in 2016, the HTC Vive headset introduced the first mass-market 6DoF controllers. Combined, these two advances unlocked a new approach to creating frame-by-frame animation with 6DoF drawing tools, which my research has developed as the Lightning Artist Toolkit—a complete pipeline for hand-drawn volumetric animation; at the time of writing, the only open-source example of its kind. The goal of the project is to make creation in 3D as expressive and intuitive as creation in 2D, by retaining the human gesture from its origins in hand-drawn animation on paper. Importing and manipulating scanned photographic images alongside handmade drawings has been a core feature of 2D image editing and animation tools for over fifty years. Initially, applying raster editing capabilities to real-world animation production was impractical—so the earliest hand-drawn computer-animated short films used 2D vector strokes. Today, operating naïvely on 3D voxels similarly requires excessive computational resources to be scaled up for even a few minutes of high-resolution footage, and working with 3D vector graphics representations offers a promising solution. At this project’s core is a collection of applied machine learning systems that transform live-action volumetric video into a sequence of volumetric brushstroke vectors. Integrated into a conventional animation workflow, this is suitable for the practical production of hand-drawn 3D animated short films in an XR drawing system. The contribution is less a computer vision challenge with an objective goal, as with for example point cloud segmentation, than it is an attempt to approximate the aesthetics of human vision—to generate a collection of brushstrokes from a point cloud that resembles what an artist might draw from scratch in XR, in imitation of a drawing process that records as markings the information from a scene that was subjectively important to an individual artist. In addition to supporting animation production through this workflow, this project also contributes a large public dataset of 3D drawings that may be usable in new and unexpected ways

Dependent Contractors and the Ontario Labour Relations Board: Understanding the Board's Role in a Capitalist Economy

This dissertation explores the evolution and politics behind the concept of the ‘dependent contractor’ in Ontario, from its earliest incarnations in the late 1970s to its current usage in the gig economy, as interpreted and applied by the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB). It examines how the Board’s interpretation and application of dependent contractor provisions has impacted workers whose employment status falls somewhere between traditional notions of independent contractor and employee, i.e. the ‘grey area’ as the Board has referred to it, over a period of changing employment relationships and of increasingly precarious work. The research tracks these changes over time, examining how previous OLRB jurisprudence on dependent contractors can be seen to impact its decisions in more contemporary contexts (e.g Foodora, 2020) and what this might tell us about the Board’s understanding of employment relations in a changing capitalist economy. The analysis seeks to place the actions of the OLRB into a broader social context to assess what factors have influenced the Board’s decisions and gauge how it understands both its potential to address employment inequities and the limits it faces in doing so within a capitalist economy. This dissertation argues that the OLRB operated with an implicit industrial pluralist understanding of labour-capital relations and made decisions informed by that approach and, in doing so, lacked an appreciation of how capitalist workplaces were changing over time in a way that evaded control via that understanding. It further argues that while bodies such as the OLRB have some autonomy from capitalists and the capitalist state, they are unable to, nor are they designed to, overcome or dramatically alter the power imbalances that exist in capitalist civil society

Service-Level Prediction And Anomaly Detection Towards System Failure Root Cause Explainability In Microservice Applications

Microservice and cloud computing operations are increasingly adopting automation. The importance of models in fostering resilient and efficient adaptive architectures is central to ensuring that services operate with expected behavior and performance. To effectively predict, detect, and explain system failures, it is essential to develop a comprehensive understanding of the affected application. This means examining its unexpected behaviors from multiple perspectives, including logs, metrics, and dependencies, to uncover the underlying root causes. This thesis presents a novel approach to system failure prediction, root cause analysis and explainable failure type analysis by leveraging a three-fold modality of IT observability data: logs, metrics, and traces. The proposed methodology integrates Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to capture spatial information and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to encapsulate the temporal aspects within the data. A key emphasis lies in utilizing a stitched representation derived from logs, microservice events and resource metrics to predict system failures proactively. The traces are aggregated to construct a comprehensive service call flow graph and represented as a dynamic graph. Furthermore, permutation testing is applied to harness node scores, aiding in the identification of root causes behind these failures. We evaluate our approach on open source datasets: MicroSS, QOTD and Train Ticket dataset that captures various types of system faults such as resource overload and wrong manipulation faults. Our findings on real world cases demonstrates that the proposed three-fold modality of observability data based on enhanced preprocessing and applying GNN-GRU and gradient distance explanation model captures failure type predictions well and explains them effectively for engineers to help debug and diagnose the issue

The Impact of Changing Emotional Expressions on the Own-Race Bias

People tend to better recognize racial ingroup compared to outgroup faces, a widely demonstrated effect known as the Own-Race Bias (ORB). Past research demonstrating this effect has typically presented the same facial stimuli during encoding and recognition. Across three experiments, I investigated whether changing emotional expressions (angry versus neutral) impacted White perceivers’ recognition of White and Black faces. Results from Experiment 1 indicated that participants demonstrated a strong ORB when neutral or angry expressions were presented during both encoding and recognition. Results from Experiment 2 demonstrated that when neutral expressions changed to angry expressions, although overall recognition accuracy decreased, participants still showed a strong ORB. Results from Experiment 3 indicated that when angry expressions changed to neutral expressions, participants showed a larger decrease in recognition accuracy for White compared Black targets, ultimately reducing the ORB. The implications of these findings for facial recognition in an intergroup context are discussed

"A Nurse is not a Nurse is not a Nurse": The Social Construction of Skill Among Internationally Educated Nurses Through the Lens of Feminist Economy and Disablement

This dissertation examines policies from 2000 to 2024 regarding the assessment of internationally educated nurses' (IENs) skills, including credentials and work experience needed to enter Canadian nursing. I show that federal and provincial initiatives, like the National Nurses Assessment Service and fair access legislation, have made the process stricter, longer, and more expensive. As a result, many IENs are pushed into lower-tiered healthcare jobs, such as personal support work, characterized by high job insecurity, low wages, and increased risks of disability, including injuries, illnesses, and mental health distress. I argue that IENs' downward occupational mobility extends beyond a policy failure or racial biases; it is intricately connected to the racialized and feminized segmentation of care work, underpinning Canada’s development as a settler-colonial capitalist state. It is a continuation of a gatekeeping mechanism where (a) white nurses enhance their power and privilege—like better pay, benefits, and social status—by upholding masculinist and colonial beliefs about skill, often marginalizing labour associated with poor, non-white women, and (b) settlers access a pool of easily exploitable labour to fulfill the nation’s social reproductive demands. Unlike past racially explicit exclusions, the current policy uses “managed” integration, marked by selectivity (higher scrutiny) and assimilation (limited to those who approximate Canadian nursing standards). This segmentation is masked by race-neutral policies focusing on public safety and upholding international applicants' rights to fairness. Despite the advantages of racial segmentation processes, I illustrate how the downward occupational mobility of IENs adversely affects their health and the welfare of impoverished communities in their home countries, particularly the Philippines, and is closely linked to neoliberal privatization and declining care standards in Canada. By integrating insights from critical policy analysis, feminist political economy, critical race theory, and critical disability studies, I develop a framework to (a) examine the ideological and socioeconomic interests integration policy supports and (b) advocate for a fundamentally different approach to healthcare organization, specifically, one that challenges the hierarchical classification of skills (i.e., distinguishing between high-skilled and low-skilled jobs) as the mechanism that determines workers' unequal access to compensation, benefits, job security, legal protections, and social status

Normalized Moments for Photo-realistic Style Transfer

Style transfer, the operation of matching appearance features between source and target images, is a complex and highly subjective problem. Due to the profundity of the concept of artistic style, the optimal solution is ill-defined, so the variety of approaches that have been proposed represent partial solutions to varying degrees of efficiency, usability and appearance of results. In this work a photo-realistic style transfer method for image and video is proposed that is based on vision science principles and on a recent mathematical formulation for the deterministic decoupling of features. As a proxy for mimicking the effects of camera color rendering or post processing, the employed features (the first through fourth order moments of the color distribution) represent important cues for visual adaptation and pre-attentive processing. The method is evaluated on the above criteria in a series of application relevant experiments and is shown to have results of high visual quality, without spatio-temporal artifacts, and validation tests in the form of observer preference experiments show that it compared very well with the state-of-the-art (deep learning, optimal transport, etc.) The computational complexity of the algorithm is low, and a numerical implementation that is amenable for real-time video application is proposed and demonstrated. Finally, general recommendations for photo-realistic style transfer are discussed

Optical Polarization Studies Of Latex Beads In Aqueous Solution: An Analog For Radar Scattering In Water-Ice Medium

This study presents low phase angle 0◦−5◦ measurements of polarimetric properties of icy planetary regolith analog materials acquired using the custom-built Multi-Axis-Goniometer-Instrument (MAGI). We present same sense (SC), and opposite sense (OC) backscatter circular polarization coefficients, circular polarization ratio (CPR), and degree of linear polarization (DLP) of spherical latex (non-dye) beads of varying sizes and volume concentrations (v/v) in aqueous solutions (λ=0.8μm) in water. We leverage Mie scattering calculations to accurately simulate the polarization behavior of light in an aqueous solution of latex beads. We also present measurements of alumina powder in air at λ=1.064μm. Measurements showed that at a low incidence angle (i=0◦), backscatter is dominated by surface specular single-bounce scattering, which hides other scattering processes. At high (i=15◦) incidence angle, surface single-bounce surface scattering becomes negligible, allowing for the detection of diffuse, dihedral (multiple bounces) scattering. We find that classical Mie alumina particles (2.1μm, 4.0μm) enhance subsurface scattering due to a larger void space relative to larger Mie particles (30μm), which cause the radar signal to scatter forward off small imperfections, maintaining the polarization properties of the signal and generating high >1 CPR. Latex beads, representing impurities, demonstrate the impact of isotropic and anisotropic scattering on radar signatures. Experiment and model found that the scattering medium’s anisotropy correlates to the size of the beads, while the void space of the medium inversely correlates with the bead size and the volume concentration (v/v) of the beads. Model and measurements show that Rayleigh-sized beads (impurities), due to isotropic scattering from the reduced scattering cross-section and higher transparency relative to larger impurities, generate subsurface single bounce scattering, producing OC≫SC and a low (<0.5) CPR and across all v/v with SC, and CPR proportional to v/v, but with OC, and DLP inversely proportional to v/v. Model of Rayleigh-sized beads (impurities) has increased modeled transparency that results in more simulated single-bounce scattering relative to experiment. Conversely, model and measurements of classical and large Mie beads show anisotropic scattering that intensifies scattering in the forward direction with high CPR, inversely proportional to the volume concentration with discrepancies between 4◦−5◦ relative to model

Subversive Mundane: Pop Music & the Islamic Republic of Iran

The thesis claims that the expansion of a grand ideology to the practices of everyday life by an interventionist regime endows popular culture an explicit emancipatory power, elevates the mundane, and transforms it to an implicit political statement uttering against the initial ideal of the grand narrative which becomes shattered, depoliticized, and fragmented on a daily basis

Monitoring and Modeling Long-term Environmental Influences on a Shallow Excavation Using Machine Learning: Case Study of Tomb TT95 in the Theban Necropolis, Luxor, Egypt

Exposure of rock in thermal cycling has been linked to reduction in intact rock sample strength at a laboratory scale and has been characterized as a potential triggering mechanism for rock falls. However, the long-term effect of climatic fluctuations on shallow rock excavations still remains unknown. This research investigates the long-term effects of climatic fluctuations on shallow rock excavations by monitoring a damaged pillar in TT95, an underground funerary chapel in Theban Necropolis, Luxor, Egypt. Using two orthogonally placed extensometers, relative displacements of the pillar were measured alongside temperature and humidity. Findings indicate that pillar displacements correlate with seasonal temperature changes, showing a 0.02 mm/year drift. Data-driven CNN models were developed for forecasting, with one extensometer model achieving high accuracy (R²: 0.98) and the other performing poorly (R²: -0.2). The study suggests that continued pillar drift could cause loose rock blocks on the chapel ceiling to detach over time