Emerging Constitutional Norms: Continuous Judicial Amendment of the Constitution—The Proportionality Test as a Moving Target

The so-called proportionality test of modifications to the Canadian Constitution are discussed. The Constitution is, at times, described as a moving target for change

Application Packaging Tracking System

In the business world it is very difficult to manage and track user application installations and licensing. The primary problem with this area is currently there is no single solution that encapsulates the entire process. The current commercially available tracking systems, such as SMS, DevTrack and Installshield Tracking system, do not provide a complete solution. These products provide partial solutions. However, they do not address the entire problem. In this thesis we proposed an Application Packaging Tracking System. This system tracks application installations throughout the entire process, from submission to deployment

The Catholic school parish nexus: A case study

The study recorded in this thesis sought to gain initial baseline information about the purpose of the Catholic schools, from the perspective of those who lead Catholic schools and from the perceptive of those who lead parishes in the diocese of Townsville. The study is perhaps the first step in beginning to ask whether a nineteenth century decision about Catholic schools as "the best sociological conditions for the religious socialization of the young is .... necessarily the best twentieth century solution" (Leavey, 1993, p9). To address that issue three key questions need to be answered . Firstly, for whom do our Catholic schools exist in the 1990s? Second, what do we, want our Catholic schools to be doing for those entrusted to them - or what criteria do we use to measure their effectiveness? Thirdly, what is the relationship of the school to the local church community - is it valid to call Catholic schools "faith communities" in their own right? As the study is concerned with the perceptions of parish leadership and school leadership in a particular diocese a case study method was chosen. The study sought information in three areas: - The perceived purposes of the Catholic school today - The changing role of the Catholic school today and its relationship to parish - The changing evangelising role of parish and school The study concluded that Catholic schools in the Diocese of Townsville provide the only experience of church for most of their students and indeed for many, if not most of their families. But it is a transient experience for there is little attempt to link the school faith community with parish or any other external faith community. Parents appear to be struggling with their role as primary educators in handing on the faith and are seeking much more from schools in this regard. Both parish and schools are operating quite independently with each intent on establishing their own faith community. The research also highlighted that allegiances to parish have changed. The data indicate that less than 20% regularly attend Sunday Eucharist and both parish leadership and school leadership recognise that many families avail themselves of the many services now offered through the schools. While the smaller, country parishes still appear to have some relevance and some sense of community, larger towns or city parishes appear to define community quite differently. The research also highlighted the paucity of dialogue between those who lead schools and parishes in the Diocese and this has contributed to the lack of clarity about the nature and purpose of Catholic schooling today. In reality many pastors' expectations of schools had changed little and the traditional criteria for success (attendance at Mass, involvement in parish, reception of sacraments) were still applied. Catholic school leadership teams were also struggling with defining the nature of purpose of Catholic schools, particularly in the light of the changing expectations of parents who enroll their students in Catholic schools. Catholic schools are now the only experience of church for so many students was clearly recognised. The additional responsibility this places on school leadership and on the faith witness of teachers was also recognised by all involved in the research as a critical issue

Community Civic Engagement as an Enabler of Student Flourishing

Civic Engagement is a process where people join together to conduct public work, it may be for political activism, advocating for social justice, consciousness raising, challenging and changing societal systems. It usually incorporates levels of social connectedness, coherence, shared philosophies, comradeship, social responsibility, compassion, courage and transcendence. Familiar civic engagement terms across Higher Education include, volunteering, service learning, community based learning/research, community engaged research and capacity building

The Chimp Challenge: Working memory in chimps and humans

Matsuzawa (2012) presented work at Evolang demonstrating the working memory abilities of chimpanzees. (Inoue & Matsuzawa, 2007) found that chimpanzees can correctly remember the location of 9 randomly arranged numerals displayed for 210ms - shorter than an average human eye saccade. Humans, however, perform poorly at this task. Matsuzawa suggests a semantic link hypothesis: while chimps have good visual, eidetic memory, humans are good at symbolic associations. The extra information in the semantic, linguistic links that humans possess increase the load on working memory and make this task difficult for them. We were interested to see if a wider search could find humans that matched the performance of the chimpanzees. We created an online version of the experiment and challenged people to play. We also attempted to run a non-semantic version of the task to see if this made the task easier. We found that, while humans can perform better than Inoue and Matsuzawa (2007) suggest, chimpanzees can perform better still. We also found no evidence to support the semantic link hypothesis

Pluralisme juridique à Kahnawake?

L'observation et l'analyse des institutions, canadienne et traditionnelles, à Kahnawake révèle que, sur le plan formel, on se trouve en face de multiples sources de normativité, étatiques et non étatiques, qui forment un pluralisme très complexe et évolutif. Au cours des dernières années, ce pluralisme juridique réel a diminué d'intensité, notamment à travers le transfert de légitimité et d'effectivité normative entre les différents ordres juridiques en cause, tout en maintenant intactes les apparences formelles d'un pluralisme à la fois intra- et extra-étatique. La domination d'un ordre juridique sur d'autres, sinon l'effectivité et même la survivance d'un ordre juridique donné, dépendraient de trois facteurs : les ressources financières, la crédibilité externe et la légitimité interne. On constate également des ressemblances entre le droit autochtone et le nôtre. Il y a similitude entre les wampums et nos lois constitutionnelles canadiennes, également imprécis, suscitant les mêmes mécanismes d'interprétation, et le même rôle, pour l'interprète, dans la production du droit. On note aussi la similitude des limites normatives, liées à une légitimité fondée sur la correspondance entre les valeurs que les producteurs du droit y inscrivent et les valeurs dominantes dans une collectivité.The observation and analysis of Canadian and traditional institutions at Kahnawake have demonstrated that from a formal standpoint, the observer is faced with multiple sources of governmental and non-governmental normativity, which constitute a highly complex and evolutionary pluralism. In recent years, this legal pluralism has lost some of its intensity, namely through the transfer of legitimacy and normative effectivity between the various levels of legal orders involved, while still keeping intact the formal appearances of a pluralism both intra and extra state oriented. The dominance of one legal order over the others, not to mention the effectiveness and even the survival of a given legal order, seem to depend upon three factors : financial resources, external credibility and internal legitimacy. Resemblances between native legal systems and our own are to be noted. The similarity between the wampums and our Canadian constitutional acts — both lacking in precision — call upon the same techniques of interpretation, and the same role for the interpreter, in the production of norms. There is also a similarity of normative limits linked to legitimacy based upon the correspondence between the values that legal interpreters write into law and the dominant values in the community

Treatment of Diffuse Cutaneous Systemic Sclerosis with Hyperimmune Caprine Serum

Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a multisystem autoimmune rheumatic disorder with high morbidity and the highest case specific mortality of the rheumatic diseases. There is no currently approved unequivocally effective treatment for SSc and therefore there is a huge unmet medical need for novel and effective therapies. Hyperimmune caprine serum (HCS) is a goat serum extract derivative produced from goats vaccinated with a detergent-inactivated HIV viral lysate. It contains caprine immunoglobulins and small molecular weight proteins as well as a CRH, α-2 macroglobulin (α-2M) and lipoprotein-related peptide-1 complex. In this thesis we explore the hypothesis that hyperimmune caprine serum improves skin and other measures of disease severity in established dcSSc by modulating immunological function that determines persistence of clinical disease. This hypothesis is explored through 1) a prospective clinical trial, 2) long-term clinical use and 3) detailed assessment of serum growth factors and cytokines, as well as established and exploratory markers of disease. The primary objective of the clinical trial was to explore safety and tolerability of HCS in established diffuse cutaneous systemic sclerosis (dcSSc). Secondary objectives included assessment of potential efficacy and biological activity and exploration of candidate biomarkers. There were no safety concerns and frequency of adverse events was not different between HCS and placebo group. MRSS improved in the HCS group and worsened in the placebo group, with more responders in the HCS group at 26 weeks. Neuropathic pain improved in the HCS group compared to placebo. There was a trend to benefit for lung function indices. Cluster analysis revealed changes in a number of cytokines in the HCS group compared to placebo, in parallel with the skin changes. In particular, α-MSH and ACTH were significantly increased in the HCS group leading use to hypothesise that improvement in MRSS may have been mediated through the melanocortin system

Social networks and cultural transmission

Language is a complex dynamical system that is shaped not just through biological evolution but by the way it is used in a social context. Sociolinguists have long understood that the structure of a society strongly affects the nature of the languages that emerge. Computational models of language evolution, however, generally neglect the effect of social structure by modelling extremely simple population dynamics. This study explores the coevolution of language and social structure using a simple, abstract model of language learning and a plausible mechanism for network growth, namely homophily. Evolved networks are found to possess the characteristic measures of social networks: assortative mixing, transitivity and prominent community structure. The effect of embedding language-learners in the network is found to be significant. This model may also provide a platform on which existing theories and computational models of language evolution can be evaluated