NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Vers un rééchelonnement de la citoyenneté en France et au Québec : les politiques de gestion de la diversité ethnique à Marseille et Montréal

This doctoral dissertation aims at analyzing the current reconfigurations of citizenship in a context of state rescaling in France and Québec. In opposition to urban citizenship theories, we contend that in an era of globalization national citizenship is being rescaled. We use a theoretical framework based on an institutional version of N. Brenner’s state rescaling perspective and some arguments made by J. Jenson and S. Phillips in their works about citizenship regimes.  The empirical analysis draws on a comparison between the policies of ethnic diversity management - which lie at the core of citizenship models - taking place in Marseille and Montreal. Through a study of the reconfigurations taking place in the relations between institutional actors at the local scale, we show first that in a context of state rescaling, national states’ regulatory capacities over citizenship are important and, second, that cities and local state services have gained room of manoeuvre vis-à-vis the central state in regulating citizenship while implementing policies at the local scale. Though we show that in both cases citizenship has been rescaled, differences have also been found. In Québec the central state has more control over the policies implemented at the local scale than in France. These results indicate that the process of citizenship rescaling is far more institutionalised in France than in Québec.  The thesis makes contribution first to the literature on state rescaling in showing that an institutional perspective is best suited for the analysis of state rescaling processes in different countries. Second, regarding the literature about citizenship and globalization, we establish that the concept of urban citizenship cannot grasp the current transformations undergone by the institution of citizenship. Third, we show that citizenship rescaling processes are being institutionalised in a country known for its “Unitary” and “Republican” conception of citizenship. This last finding destabilizes a well-established category in the political science literature.

Keyphrases: Marseille, Québec, Canada, France, Citizenship, Ethnic diversity, State rescaling, Decentralization, Marseille, Montreal, Québec, Canada, France
Qualification et quantification de l'obligation de sécurité informationnelle dans la détermination de la faute civile

In Quebec, as in most western jurisdictions, the duty to ensure information security, i.e. the obligation bestowed upon companies to protect the integrity, confidentiality and availability of information, stems from a series of legal dispositions which, rather than to impose a certain conduct, or the use of given technologies or processes, simply demand that "reasonable", "adequate", or "sufficient" security measures be applied. However, in a field an nascent and complex as information security, where available solutions are numerous, and where case law is sparse, how can a company reliably predict the full extend of its duty? In other words, how can one establish what a reasonably prudent and diligent company would do in a field where laws, case law, and even customs fail to dictate precisely what level of diligence is sought by the legislator? The lack of legal certainty offered in such a case is obvious, and requires us to reconfigure the framework associated with the duty to ensure information security in order to identify its components and objectives. Such an endeavour begins with redefining the duty to ensure information security as a duty to reduce information-related risk to a socially acceptable leve1. Since security stems from risk management, it can therefore be said that risk is at the core of said duty. By analysing risk, i.e. by identifying the threats that aim to exploit a system's vulnerabilities, it becomes possible to specify which counter measures could be useful and what costs they may entail. From that point, it's feasible, if using the economic definition of negligence (which is based on the probability of a security breach, and the damages incurred), to establish the optimal amount that should be invested in the purchasing, upkeep and replacement of these counter measures. This type of analysis will allow companies to quantify, with a certain degree of precision, the extend to which they need to ensure information security by giving them a set of tools based on easily accessible data. Furthermore, said tools appear to be fully compatible with the current legal landscape.

Keyphrases: Information, Diligence, Obligation, Security, Information, Risk, Integrity, Confidentiality, Availability, Liability, Fault, Negligence, Diligence, Obligation
Étude multicentrique sur les stratégies de ventilation mécanique employées chez les enfants avec un œdème pulmonaire lésionnel

Acute Lung Injury and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome are life-threatening conditions frequently leading to respiratory support with mechanical ventilation.  Studies on mechanical ventilation strategies in adult patients have led to lung protective ventilation recommendations.  However, there are few pediatric clinical trials on optimal mechanical ventilation management in Acute Lung Injury and it is still unclear if strategies studied in adults are equally beneficial to children. Objective   Describe mechanical ventilation strategies in Acute Lung Injury in children. Methods Cross-sectional study for six 24-hour periods from June to November 2007 across 59 Pediatric Intensive Care Units in 12 countries in North America and Europe.  We identified children meeting Acute Lung Injury criteria and collected detailed information on illness severity, mechanical ventilation support and use of adjunctive therapies. Results Of 3823 patients screened, 414 (10.8%) were diagnosed with Acute Lung Injury and 165 were included in the study (124 received conventional mechanical ventilation, 27 high frequency oscillatory ventilation, 14 non-invasive mechanical ventilation).  In the conventional mechanical ventilation group, 43.5% were ventilated in a pressure control mode, the mean tidal volume was 8.3±3.3 ml/kg and there was no clear relationship between PEEP and FiO2 delivery.   Conclusions Our study reveals inconsistent mechanical ventilation practice and use of adjunctive therapies in children with Acute Lung Injury.  Rigorous evaluation of ventilator management strategies in children with an Acute Lung Injury are urgently needed to guide standardization of care and optimize clinical outcomes.

Keyphrases: Acute Lung Injury, Respiratory Distress Syndrome, Mechanical Ventilation, Child, Epidemiology, Pediatric Intensive Care
Le rôle des récepteurs aux cannabinoïdes CB1 et CB2 dans le guidage axonal

Following differentiation, retinal ganglion cell (RGC) axons, tipped at their distal end by the growth cone (GC), navigate through relatively long distances in a highly directed manner in order to establish functional synapses with thalamic and superior colliculus (SC) neurons. This is achieved with the help of extracellular guidance molecules which steer RGC axon growth by regulating GC morphology by means of attractive and/or repulsive mechanisms. In the adult brain, endocannabinoids (eCBs) exert an important neuromodulatory function by acting as retrograde messengers to regulate the function of many synapses. Endocannabinoids act mainly via their Gi/o protein coupled receptors CB1 (CB1R) and CB2 (CB2R). Due to their presence at the fetal and early postnatal periods, it has been proposed that eCBs and their receptors might be involved in several developmental events, such as cell proliferation and migration, axon guidance and synaptogenesis. We observed that during early postnatal development, components of the eCB system are expressed along the visual pathway (the optic chiasm, the lateral geniculate nucleus and the SC). To assess the implication of the eCB system, in vitro, embryonic retinal explant and primary neuron cultures were treated with pharmacological agonists and inverse agonists of CB1R and CB2R. These experiments demonstrated that these cannabinoid receptors modify the GC’s morphology. Most importantly, CB1R and CB2R act through the cAMP/PKA pathway to modulate the presence of DCC at the plasma membrane. In vivo, CB1R and CB2R play a major role and the absence of either one of them induces a decrease in eye-specific segregation of retinal projections. These results show an implication of CB1R and CB2R during RGC growth and retinothalamic development.

Keyphrases: guidage axonal, DCC, PKA, Growth cone, axon guidance, cannabinoid receptors, RGC, DCC, PKA, cAMP
Effet de l'histoire lumineuse sur la sensibilité rétinienne et circadienne à la lumière

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of two weeks exposure in a dim or bright light environment on retinal and circadian sensitivity to light in a controlled laboratory setting. Given that a change in sensitivity to light could modify the circadian adjustment to the external light-dark cycle, it was expected that the circadian phase would be modified with the light treatment and have an effect on alertness and mood. Ten participants were exposed to a dim light (DL) environment (70 lux) and 10 participants to a bright light (BL) environment (3000 lux) 10 hours per day for 12 consecutive days. Light exposure was measured 5 days prior to the onset of the experiment in the subject’s natural environment and during the entire laboratory experiment with an Actiwatch-L®. Retinal function was assessed with the electroretinogram (ERG). Circadian light sensitivity was evaluated with a salivary melatonin suppression test. Retinal and circadian sensitivity measures were taken before and after the experimental condition. Alertness, sleepiness and mood were measured several times per day at fixed intervals. After 12 days of controlled light exposure, the amplitude of amax of the photopic ERG was decreased in BL whereas it was increased in DL. In scotopic ERG, there was a difference in the retinal sensitivity (log K) between the two groups before light treatment that disappeared at the end of light exposure (p=.053). The percentage of melatonin suppression after 90 minutes exposure to the melatonin suppression test was decreased in BL while it did not changed in DL condition. This interaction, however, did not reach significance (p=.16). We measured a 58 minutes phase advance in the BL condition (p=.04) and a 26 minutes phase delay in DL (p=.32). Measures of subjective vigilance (EVA) suggested that BL subjects were more alert after the light treatment than DL subject (p=.02). However, there was no difference in the psychomotor vigilance task or mood. Light history did not modify the retinal sensitivity as predicted by the hypotheses. However, there was a trend toward an increased circadian sensitivity in the dim light condition. The improvement of subjective vigilance in the BL condition was not supported by the results at the psychomotor vigilance task. Light history had no effect on the mood of the subjects. Long-term effects of a light treatment are difficult to isolate from shorter direct effects of light. Moreover, the study of adaptative environmental changes that spontaneously appeared in the field are possibly masked in a laboratory setting where confinement could induce physiological and psychological changes.

Keyphrases: Vigilance, Cortisol, Electroretinography, Melatonin, Circadian phase, Light, Vigilance, Reaction time, Cortisol, Mood
Caractérisation clinique et génétique d’une nouvelle forme d’ataxie autosomique récessive dans la population québécoise

Autosomal Recessive Ataxias are a group of heterogeneous neurological disorders consisting of gross incoordination of muscle movements implying dysfunction of parts of the nervous system that coordinate movement such as the cerebellum. Several hereditary forms exist for these patterns of neurological dysfunction. In this thesis we reported the identification and characterization of a new form in the French-Canadian population. Autosomal Recessive Spastic Ataxia with frequent Leukoencephalopathy (ARSAL; also referred to as Autosomal Recessive Spastic Ataxia type 3 (SPAX3); OMIM 611390) is the second recessive spastic ataxia originally described in the French-Canadian population. Furthermore, close to 50% of our cases share a Portneuf region origin. In 2006 we described the cardinal features of this new form of ataxia. A first genome wide scan was performed on three informative families with microsatellite (single tandem repeat) markers and a parametric linkage analysis. This allowed us to identify a candidate interval on chromosome 2q33-34. Sequencing of more than 37 genes did not uncover the putative mutation. In order to refine this candidate interval, we have a second genome scan using single nucleotide polymorphism SNP markers and we have identified a smaller candidate interval of 0.658 Mb in which there are nine genes. The use of a multimodal approach was required to uncover and characterize the three mutations (one deletion and two complex rearrangements) in the mitochondrial met-tRNA synthetase gene (MARS2). We suggest that complex rearrangement of the 5’ region of the gene has a great impact on the gene transcription regulation, which affect its mitochondrial function and impair the neuronal tissue.

Keyphrases: Ataxia, Leukoencephalopathy, Cerebellum, Mutation mitochondrial, MARS2
The great asymmetry : America's closest allies in times of war

This dissertation focuses on military cooperation between the United States and its special allies. It argues that alliance expectations determine the level of military cooperation, while two intervening variables - the level of government cohesion and military capabilities - determine its implementation. This study also shows how secondary states deploy strategies to overcome power asymmetries through bilateral concessions, international organizations and by appealing to principle. The focus of the research is on special allies, as they have the most to gain or lose by going along with American plans. My contention is that secondary allies can rarely influence the dominant ally decisively, but they can act autonomously and resist to pressures exerted by the stronger alliance partner. The argument builds on three central claims. First, power asymmetries between allies translate into different assessments of international threats. Second, when disagreements over threats arise, the outcome of intra-alliance bargaining is not necessarily dictated by the preferences of the stronger power. Third, secondary states, as opposed to the dominant partner, face unique constraints when facing major foreign policy decisions, i.e. they face a trade-off between establishing a credible reputation as an alliance partner in a politically feasible way while minimizing domestic audience costs. To examine the theoretical puzzle presented by asymmetric military cooperation, I introduce a causal explanation that builds on neoclassical realism, to zone in on the interaction between systemic and domestic variables. My research makes a contribution to alliance theory and foreign policy decision-making by studying how special allies respond to American decisions in times of threat and how systemic constraints are channeled through state-level variables. To investigate the causal link between threat perception, alliance expectations and domestic constraints, this study relies on the method of structured focused comparison with three detailed case studies. The focus is on the initial decision made by special allies regarding whether or not to participle in joint mobilization with the United States. The decision-making process is presented from the perspective of secondary allied states and measures the explanatory factors that motivated the decision on military cooperation. The case studies are the UK, Canada and Australia’s response to the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq during the period of 2001 to 2003.

Keyphrases: International relations, International security, Military cooperation, Military alliances, Foreign and defence policy, Military intervention
Paper Dinosaurs : field notes as finds in Robert Kroetsch's Badlands

Paper Dinosaurs: Field Notes as Finds in Robert Kroetsch's Badlands revisits the 1975 postmodern novel about a fictionalized palaeontological expedition down Alberta's Red Deer River in light of recent calls for systematic investigation into the source materials of historiographic meta-fictions in anglophone Canadian literature. Inspired by John Livingston-Lowes' canonical dissection of the major poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, via the treasure trove of the Gutch Memorandum Book in The Road to Xanadu, this study undertakes a new process focused inquiry into the archive and into the documentary tradition. By excavating unpublished holograph materials from Quebec, Ontario, and Alberta repositories written by Geological Survey of Canada collectors, geologists, and palaeontologists, in addition to field-notes, research notes and diaries produced by Robert Kroetsch during the writing of Badlands, this critical examination reveals hitherto unseen strata underlying a particular work of fiction.   In most any palaeontological dig the removal of overburden from a target specimen often exposes surprising ancillary data, which through careful interpretation may give vital clues to palaeo-enviromments. A dinosaur skeleton is rarely pried whole from a sterile quarry. Neither is any inquiry into literary process. No text exists unto itself. Because Kroetsch so self-consciously crafted his narrative as an interrogation of history generation and transmission – specifically via the written word in the vehicle of field-notes – this study surveys a broad field encompassing inter-texts from antiquity, science, history, popular history, travel writing, Canadian and World literatures. Recourse is freely made to widely divergent authors and periods from Thomas Jefferson and the barrow mounds to Bruce Chatwin and his "brontosaurus" skin.   Of course no such inter-disciplinary enterprise can be exhaustive. Rather this project assembles a kind of literary cabinet of curiosities grouped around the principal specimen of Robert Kroetsch's Badlands. In their most reductive configuration, field notes are messages to posterity. Through three main themes this study explores how these messages may be conveyed: "Saxa Loquuntur!", so titled after Freud's archaeological analogy, investigates metaphors of stone speaking; "Good Jones" interrogates how taxonomy can be made to serve a bone collector's desire to be remembered; and finally "Box 16" follows a documentary trail into Kroetsch's papers to trace not only the construction of a novel but also notions of time and place, and authorship.

Keyphrases: Archaeology, Archive, Curiosity, Documentary, Field-notes, Historiography, Métafiction, Metafiction, Palaeontology, Posterity, Taxonomy
Training deep convolutional architectures for vision

High-level vision tasks such as generic object recognition remain out of reach for modern Artiﬁcial Intelligence systems. A promising approach involves learning algorithms, such as the Arﬁcial Neural Network (ANN), which automatically learn to extract useful features for the task at hand. For ANNs, this represents a difﬁcult optimization problem however. Deep Belief Networks have thus been proposed as a way to guide the discovery of intermediate representations, through a greedy unsupervised training of stacked Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM). The articles presented here-in represent contributions to this ﬁeld of research.     The ﬁrst article introduces the convolutional RBM. By mimicking local receptive ﬁelds and tying the parameters of hidden units within the same feature map, we considerably reduce the number of parameters to learn and enforce local, shift-equivariant feature detectors. This translates to better likelihood scores, compared to RBMs trained on small image patches.     In the second article, recent discoveries in neuroscience motivate an investigation into the impact of higher-order units on visual classiﬁcation, along with the evaluation of a novel activation function. We show that ANNs with quadratic units using the softsign activation function offer better generalization error across several tasks.                          Finally, the third article gives a critical look at recently proposed RBM training algorithms. We show that Contrastive Divergence (CD) and Persistent CD are brittle in that they require the energy landscape to be smooth in order for their negative chain to mix well. PCD with fast-weights addresses the issue by performing small model perturbations, but may result in spurious samples. We propose using simulated tempering to draw negative samples. This leads to better generative models and increased robustness to various hyperparameters.

Keyphrases: Neural network, Deep learning, Unsupervised learning, Supervised learning, RBM, RBM, Energy-based model, Tempered MCMC, Tempered MCMC
L'expérience comme mode de détermination des faits dans le procès civil

The theme of the use of experience as a mode of fact findings, i.e. as an element which fills the gaps in a totality of evidence in the civil procedure, is somewhat tabooed. The doctrine is frequently based upon the premise that a decision-maker should render a decision solely on the basis of evidence and that he should completely abstain from inserting into the fact findings anything which is not present in the evidence. This vision is distant from the legal reality. In the first part, three procedural principles which prevent the experience from the use as a mode of fact findings will be treated. The principles in question are the principle of reconstruction of the past event, the principle of setting aside the knowledge obtained out of the procedure and the principle of exclusion of hearsay evidence. Then the attention is paid to different types of experience (i.e. the lay experience, divisible into "bon sens" and into common sense, and the scientific experience) and to the methods of their fonctionning in the civil procedure. The first part is concluded by a brief confrontation of different types of experience with the procedural principles. The second part is dedicated to an analysis of the experience in the three legal instruments: judicial notice, presumption of fact and expert testimony. The interest is focused especially on verification whether the experience works inside the legal instruments as a mode of facts findings and then what are the limits which the law fixes to the experience in this role. The research will confirm that the principal instrument by which the experience as a mode of fact findings penetrates into the civil procedure is the presumption of fact.

Keyphrases: Bon sens, Civil procedure, Experience, Common sense, Judicial notice, Presumption of fact, Expert testimony