Canadian Muslim Voting Guide: Federal Election 2019

This guide assigns a grade to each federal political party Leader\u27s response to identified key issues of importance to the interests of Canadian Muslims and the wider geopolitical concerns that affect Muslims globally. The criteria used to determine these grades has been based on whether a party leader\u27s particular political standpoints and/or policy initiatives are positive or detrimental to the interests of Canadian Muslims and the wider geopolitical concerns that affect Muslims globally

Distributed Bayesian Probabilistic Matrix Factorization

Matrix factorization is a common machine learning technique for recommender systems. Despite its high prediction accuracy, the Bayesian Probabilistic Matrix Factorization algorithm (BPMF) has not been widely used on large scale data because of its high computational cost. In this paper we propose a distributed high-performance parallel implementation of BPMF on shared memory and distributed architectures. We show by using efficient load balancing using work stealing on a single node, and by using asynchronous communication in the distributed version we beat state of the art implementations

A GPU-accelerated Branch-and-Bound Algorithm for the Flow-Shop Scheduling Problem

Branch-and-Bound (B&B) algorithms are time intensive tree-based exploration methods for solving to optimality combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we investigate the use of GPU computing as a major complementary way to speed up those methods. The focus is put on the bounding mechanism of B&B algorithms, which is the most time consuming part of their exploration process. We propose a parallel B&B algorithm based on a GPU-accelerated bounding model. The proposed approach concentrate on optimizing data access management to further improve the performance of the bounding mechanism which uses large and intermediate data sets that do not completely fit in GPU memory. Extensive experiments of the contribution have been carried out on well known FSP benchmarks using an Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPU card. We compared the obtained performances to a single and a multithreaded CPU-based execution. Accelerations up to x100 are achieved for large problem instances

Cultivating Concrete Utopia: Understanding How Japan's Permaculture Experiments are Shaping a Political Vision of Sustainable Living

While the Japanese culture has long fascinated because of its respect for nature, this did not prevent Japanese society from significantly fueling some of today's most burning agro-environmental issues. More recently however, in reaction to the increasing recognition of the problems posed by the industrial agriculture model, diverse alternative models of food production have emerged throughout the country. Within these alternative models, the case of permaculture is particularly interesting, as it merges internationally shared targets for sustainable agriculture with socio-cultural features of sustainable living. Indeed, permaculture was originally constructed from the terms "permanent," "agriculture," and "culture" and it has spread rapidly as a social movement promoting ways of living that tackle sustainability through the nexus between nature, culture and agriculture. Building on the data collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with Japanese permaculture practitioners, this paper gives an overview of the vision of sustainable living shared and conveyed by Japan's permaculture movement, and attempts to show from where this vision is experimented. In order to spell out the double bind in which the permaculture movement seems to be caught, I use the concept of "concrete utopia," which refers to concrete experiments with sustainable living that, while localized in time and space, nevertheless carry within them the seeds of a possible-but still utopian-generalization. I thus show how the Japanese permaculture movement seeks sustainability within Japanese culture. The Japanese case highlights how cultural and environmental sustainability mutually reinforce each other and thereby enriches the concept of concrete utopia

Qualité dyadique et régulation émotionnelle lors d'un court moment de séparation mère-bébé 12 mois après une naissance prématurée

Cette étude compare la qualité de l'interaction mère-bébé évaluée à 4 mois (âge corrigé pour les prématurés) avec la régulation émotionnelle de l'enfant à 12 mois chez des prématurés nés à moins de 33 semaines d'âge gestationnel et des nouveau-nés à terme. L'objectif est d'identifier les effets de la prématurité sur la régulation émotionnelle de l'enfant en évaluant le rôle des interactions précoces dans ce processus. La qualité interactive est évaluée à 4 mois à l'aide du Care-index qui classe les dyades en trois types de patterns interactifs (Sensible-Coopérant, Contrôlant-Compulsif et Passif). La régulation émotionnelle de l'enfant est mesurée lors d'un court épisode de séparation mère-bébé à 12 mois (paradigme de la Situation Etrange, Ainsworth 1978) à partir de l'évaluation de l'intensité et la durée des pleurs. Pour compléter cette analyse, des mesures des taux de cortisol salivaire, reflétant l'un des indicateurs de la régulation neuroendocrinienne, ont également été effectuées. Les résultats de cette étude ne montrent pas de différence de régulation émotionnelle à 12 mois, entre les prématurés et les nouveau-nés à terme. Par contre, lorsqu'on divise l'ensemble de l'échantillon en fonction de la qualité des interactions précoces, on note des capacités de régulation émotionnelle plus optimales à 12 mois lorsqu'il s'agit de dyades évaluées comme Sensible-Coopérant à 4 mois, comparées aux dyades de type Contrôlant. Les enfants ayant de meilleures capacités de régulation émotionnelle à 12 mois, montrent des différences quant à la régulation neuroendocrinienne. Ceci met en évidence un certain impact de la qualité interactive précoce sur la régulation émotionnelle ultérieure de l'enfant. Cette étude nuance l'impact de la prématurité sur le devenir de l'enfant en mettant en avant l'importance des aspects relationnels précoces

A Critical Discourse Study of Decision Making during the Drafting Process of UNSC Resolutions: Textual Travels and Recontextualization of the Representation of the Syrian Conflict

Quite recently, attention has been paid to studying United Nations Security Council (UNSC) practices by analysing the language that is used in its resolutions to show how countries are unequally treated by the Security Council (SC) Gruenberg (2009) and how vague language can be used as a political strategy to fulfil particular objectives (Scotto di Carlo, 2013). However, the reasons why drafters opt for a particular formulation when issuing resolutions and the way how they agree on it is not researched. For a better understanding of these variables, the current study opens up a new research setting that can contribute to the aforementioned studies by analysing the drafting process of UNSC resolutions. The present study is a critical discourse analysis of the drafting process of two UNSC resolutions concerning the recent Syrian conflict. The data analysed in the current thesis is composed of 13 texts: two resolutions (Res 2042 and Res 2043) and eleven drafts that were issued during 2011 and 2012 concerning the Syrian conflict. The SC issued its first resolutions about the Syrian conflict in April 2012, which is a year after the outbreak of the first demonstrations in Syria. During this long period, the SC witnessed heated discussions between its member states on the formulation of the resolution that should be adopted about the Syrian uprising. Meanwhile, two drafts were vetoed by the Russian Federation and China. Indeed, there was a split in the SC concerning the Syrian conflict. The Russian Federation and China often disagreed with the remaining member states on the formulation of drafts in general and on specific issues such as assigning responsibility and regime change. The drafting process of UNSC resolutions is then a new research field to explore how an ideological struggle in the council is handled. It aims to testify two assumptions: (1) member states use language to impose their attitudes and views but (2) they may also opt for vague and mitigated representations to avoid the use of veto and reach consensus. In other words, the present study attempts to test the following hypothesis: when there is an ideological struggle, drastic and ideological words or representations in drafts (e.g. the SC demands) change into being indirect and less forceful in resolutions (e.g. the SC calls for) in order to reach a consensus and take corporate decisions. The current research work answers the following questions: how are the issues, on which member states disagreed, linguistically represented in drafts and in what way are they transformed to reach consensus? How can texts with supposedly different representations of the conflict end up in one resolution that should satisfy all member states of the council? 2 To test the hypothesis and answer the aforementioned inquiries, the present thesis compares the representations of the conflict that are proposed by the different state members of the council during the drafting process. To show ´what happens´ to the representations in drafts, I adopt the notion of ´textual travels´ which is based on the process of recontextualization (Heffer, Rock +amp; Conley, 2013) i.e. how texts or textual fragments are (re)produced and modified in subsequent drafts in relation to their preceding ones. Moreover, the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) (Wodak 1999, 2001) lends itself easily as the theoretical qualitative framework to this study. It is seen as a group of approaches that are based on interdisciplinarity (Reisigl +amp; Wodak, 2001). It is useful to understand the content and the discursive strategies deployed in drafts and resolutions in relation to the political and historical contexts. The ideological attitudes of member states are supposed to be reflected in the language they use to represent social actors as well as their (re)actions. Three major elements of the representations are then analysed: (1) social actors that are involved in the conflict, (2) their actions and (3) the reaction of the SC. A number of linguistic tools and frameworks from different fields are integrated in the current study to investigate the aforementioned parameters. To study how social actors are represented in texts, an adaptation of the Social Actors Network proposed by Van Leeuwen (2008) is used as it provides different choices from which a draftsman can choose to refer to social actors (e.g. whether they are present or absent, and if they are referred to in specific or general terms and in a personalized or impersonalized way, etc.). To further show how social actors as well as their actions are (re)conceptualized, the construal operations of profiling, focus and schematization from Cognitive Grammar are also employed. These conceptual operations are apt tools to conduct critical discourse studies since they can “in certain discursive contexts, be seen to function ideologically by bringing into effect different types of discursive strategy” (Hart, 2014, p. 110). The representation of the reaction of the SC is examined by studying the usage of directives that are often used in UNSC resolutions to address the participants (mainly the aggressor and the UN team). To measure the reaction of the SC (i.e. what degree of force is used when addressing the aggressor), directives are categorized intro three groups in terms of their force of imposition (i.e. weak-middle-strong) according to the semantic analysis proposed by Vanderveken (1990) and the classification suggested by Dontcheva-Navratilova (2009). All the aforementioned tools provide ´Grammars´ of recontextualization or (re)conceptualization to examine the three elements of representations. More importantly, they are supposed to reveal how nomination, predication, intensification and mitigation strategies (that are part of the DHA) are employed by drafters when representing the conflict. The exclusion, inclusion, suppression and backgrounding of groups of social actors vary from one draft to another as some suppressed social actors become totally excluded in subsequent drafts while others become less included at the end of the drafting process. The analysis shows a significant divergence between the different documents in terms of the representational choices that are opted for to refer to the group of social actors. Indeed, less lexical referential expressions are used in the last drafts and resolutions to represent both groups, especially the Syrian People. Moreover, anylsing the textual travels of the representations of these groups reveal how indetermined personalization and impersonalization are sometimes used as substitutions for the personalized determined representations. Such mitigation strategies are also noticed through the use of neutral or vague lexical terms (unspecification) and the backgrounding of social actors. The analysis of the construal operations of profiling and focus reveals that a difference in the representations of social actors exists between drafts and resolutions. Indeed, both participants (i.e. agent and patient) are more foregrounded in the first drafts than at the end of the process. Indeed, drafters tend to background the patient more frequently at the end of the drafting process than at its beginning. Moreover, the instances that background the patient at the end of the drafting process are recontextualized versions of some instances from the first, second, fourth, eighth and ninth drafts. For example, in the latter, drafters refer to the use of force against its people (SD01) and civilians (SD04, SD08, SD09V) while the expression use of weapons is opted for in SD10, SD11R, ResI and ResII which does not include a linguistic representation of the patient. Moreover, actions are analysed according to the construal operation of schematization: whether the conflict is conceptualized in terms of ACTION, FORCE or MOTION schemas. The analysis shows that the three types of schemas are used by drafters in the material. However, while the patterns of ACTION and FORCE schemas decrease at the end of the drafting process, MOTION schemas, which reduce the intensity of the event being 4 conceptualized, become more present. More importantly, other lexical expressions such as the empty vessels (violence and violation) remain present in the last drafts and the adopted resolutions as they are often employed to replace image schematic conceptualization from preceding drafts. Indeed, the analysis about the reaction of the SC shows how directives with strong force of imposition are replaced by ones that have a weak degree of imposition or other predications, such as reaffirms its full support. Reducing the degree of imposition with which the measures are introduced is a discursive strategy that is used to mitigate the representation in order to reach consensus. Directives with a middle force of imposition such as requests and invites are used in the material to always address social actors that belong to the UN Team. This finding further confirms Dontcheva-Navratilova´s assertion (2009) that directives are used as a politeness strategy to regulate the relationship between participants. The findings reveal a significant divergence between the drafts proposed by the the Russian Federation, on one hand, and the ones introduced by the remaining member states, on the other hand. This confirms what is stated in the lieterature review about the opposing attitudes that existed in the council concerning the Syrian conflict. For instance, unlike in the first two drafts, which represent Syrian Authorities as Aggressors, the Russian Federation refers to Syrian Authorities as Victims in SD03R. In addition, the Syrian People, who are conceptualized mainly as Victims and Helpers in few cases, are represented as a problem in the third draft. In other words, the Russian Federations beleieves that Syrian opposition and the Syrian authorities should discuss the ways of reforming the Syrian society. Such transformations shows how member states can use language to impose their agenda and fulfil their interests. Moreover, the deletion of the explicit reference to Syrian authorities in SD03R shows how Russian Federation attempts to impose its attitude and show its rejection of the representations in the preceding drafts. Briefly, all of the findings concerning the textual travels of the representations illustrate how the process of darfting Syrian resolutions is characterized by an interesting process of recontextualization. Some transformations are supposed to be made to fulfil some strategies (either to intensify or mitigate representations) or interests. For example, to avoid re-invoking the negative image of the Syrian Authorities, which leads to its delegetimization, in the reader´s mental representation, drafters either background its identity or use all inclusive terms such as all parties to refer to it. Another possible explanation is that drafters change 5 specific and determined references by vague formulations to make the text open for various interpretations which will satisfy all the needs of member states. In addition, the findings show how the drafting process of UNSC resolutions is an interesting research setting where drafters compete to impose their representations of the conflict which stands for personal beliefs, socially shared attitudes and knowledge. Moreover, the current study highlights the role of language in this diplomatic setting as it can be a powerful tool used by diplomats to impose their decisions or to mitigate their representations of the conflict to reach compromise. Furthermore, what is particularly interesting about the current work is that it conducts a critical discourse study of decision-making during the drafting process by addressing various factors such as the ideological struggle, textual travels and the role of veto that tend to remain hidden when only analyzing the final resolutions

Empirical Evaluation of Investor Rationality in the Asset Allocation Puzzle

We examine the portfolio-choice puzzle posed by Canner, Mankiw, and Weil (1997). The idea is to test a conclusion reached by Elton and Gruber (2000), stating that a bonds/stocks ratio which decreases in relation to risk tolerance does not necessarily mean a contradiction of modern portfolio-choice theory and does not cast doubt on the rationality of investors. From data on the portfolio composition of 470 clients of a Canadian brokerage firm, we obtain that the bonds/stocks ratio does decrease in relation to risk tolerance. We also verify the existence of the two-fund separation theorem in the assets data available to the investors in our sample.Investor rationality, asset allocation puzzle, risk tolerance, separation theorem, bonds/stocks ratio