NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Precursors and prices : structuring the Quebec synthetic drug market

Research gathered on synthetic drug markets trails behind studies on other illegal drug markets. Synthetic drug's relatively recent classification as an illicit substance, coupled with its distinct characteristics that insulate it from detection has hindered the development of reliable assessments of the markets structural features. The purpose of this study is to provide reliable insight into the inner dynamics of Quebec’s synthetic drug industry, focusing on its organizational features. Using information derived from 365 synthetic drugs seized by law enforcement over a one year period, this study will merge two techniques, drug composition and economic analyses, under a common framework to derive reliable and comprehensive assessments of the structure of Quebec's synthetic drug market. Drug composition analysis examines the drug’s chemical and physical profile to make inferences about the market structure while the economic analysis examines price determinants for the same market, providing further insight into its dynamics and distinctive features. Findings from the drug composition analysis indicate that the synthetic drug market in Quebec is likely to be composed of a high number of small structures, indicating a competitive market. The economic analysis provided complementary information, finding that both differential production costs and trafficker-consumer relations may influence price variations, depending on the region. This study concludes by emphasizing that drug composition analysis should be diligently pursued by both researchers and enforcement organizations alike to effectively target and enhance our understanding of the intricate processes that underlie the synthetic drug market.

Keyphrases: Synthetic drugs, market structure, drug composition analysis, economic analysis, price determinants
Le processus de passage à l'acte violent chez les femmes

Objective: The goal of this thesis was to understand the process by which women come to commit a violent act. More specifically, to know the meaning women give to their violence, how they reconstruct the process that led them to this act and how they come to terms with this act throughout the course of their lifetime. Method: To achieve this goal, 24 semi-structured interviews were conducted with women were detained or awaiting trial and who had committed an act of violence. Participants were met at the Maison Tanguay or female sector of the Quebec Detention. Subsequently, the interviews were transcribed and the data processed by the program NVivo. Date were analyzed according to the process proposed by grounded theory. Results: The find result is a model representing the entire process. This model takes place in four phases. The first phase involves the participants' personal history from childhood to adulthood. This phase focuses primarily on the difficulties experienced by participants and their coping strategies. The second phase relates to the period prior to the offense. It has two components: the early period, which refers to the months or weeks before the offense, and the later period, which refers to days or moments just prior to the offence. The third phase involves the occurrence of the event itself. This phase is divided into two different profiles, depending on the type of violence: instrumental vs expressive. These two profiles differ in regards to the circumstances, motives, emotions and the use or not of alternative strategies to violence. The final phase of the model focuses on the period following the violence. This phase includes the various impacts of the violent act on participants life and perceptions.

Keyphrases: Femmes violentes, violence, Violent female, Women offender, Offense process
“This wasn’t supposed to happen” : making sense of emotions in the face of expectation breach

Past research into emotions in organizational contexts, notably the research into the theories of emotional labour, the psychological contract, and equity theory, has tended to focus on questions of the rationality and appropriateness of emotional manifestations, as well as mechanisms used to control and moderate emotions. However, little empirical research has been done into how employees themselves make sense of their emotions and the processes by which they legitimize and render these emotions understandable, both to themselves and to others. In recent years, an emerging research perspective has shifted away from the normative/rationalistic perspective to address these questions. Rather than being considered strictly subjective, private, and inaccessible experiences, emotions are now seen as accessible via discourse and narrative. And more that simply being expressed in language and communication, they are understood to be constructed and negotiated by them. This research develops this perspective by drawing on the theories of sensemaking and narrative theory; looking at the detailed narratives gathered from four non-sales employees at an IT reseller. By asking research participants to talk about emotional experiences and analyzing their narratives using a narrative theory methodology, this research hopes to shed some light on how employees make sense of and legitimize their emotional experiences. Among other things, the results suggest that the process of sensemaking is very closely linked with issues of identity.

Keyphrases: organization, emotions, discourse, sensemaking, narrative analysis, discours
Analyse de la mobilité spatio-temporelle des armes à feu volées au Québec

In this study, the spatial and temporal mobility of crime guns in the province of Quebec are examined. This study proposes two new measures to assess the mobility of stolen firearms: time-to-find and distance-to-recovery. These new measures allow an assessment of the impacts of guns that were in illegal circulation in regards of the constitution of the illegal firearms market in the province of Quebec. Descriptive analyzes were first conducted in this study on three segments of the data set obtained from la Banque de données québécoise sur les armes à feu recouvrées : the complete data set, the crime guns and stolen firearms. The spatial and temporal mobility analyzes were only applied to the subgroup of 501 stolen firearms because these guns have more detailed characteristics of their movement before their recovery by judicial authorities. Results show that stolen firearms that have greater mobility in time and space in the province of Quebec are handguns, firearms involved in market crimes, non-registered and non-restricted firearms. However, in order to better understand the dynamics of stolen firearms in the territory, the registration status of a stolen firearm is the most important indicator of the mobility because, to some extent, it determines how these guns will be rooted in the illegal market. The non-registered stolen firearms in this study are in fact more likely to concentrate in the criminal markets, which significantly increase their "lifecycle” and mobility in the province of Quebec.

Keyphrases: Armes à feu, Firearms, Stolen firearms, Firearms mobility, Crime guns, Illegal market
Le modèle confluent de l'agression sexuelle appliqué à quatre paramètres de la carrière criminelle sexuelle

The purpose of this thesis is to replicate and extend Malamuth’s Confluence Model of Sexual Aggression (CMSA). The CMSA is one of the few empirically validated developmental models of men’s sexual aggression against women. In this model, sexual aggression is resulting from the convergence of two paths (sexual promiscuity and hostile masculinity). For the first time, in this thesis, the CMSA is applied to four parameters of the sexual criminal career (seriousness, frequency, age of onset, specialization) within a sample of convicted rapists (n=180). Each of the four resulting models yielded a good fit of the data. All but one of the relationships hypothesized in the CMSA were replicated in this thesis. Indeed, our results suggest that only one of the CMSA’s paths is related to each of the sexual criminal career parameters tested in this thesis. The sexual promiscuity path is related to age of onset and non-specialization (sexual promiscuity being negatively related to specialization) while the hostile masculinity path is related to seriousness and frequency. Our results are congruent with a typological approach of rapists. Each of the two CMSA’s paths is operationalized using some specific characteristics which are known to be linked to certain types of rapists (opportunistic, angry, sadistic types). In turn, those types of rapists present distinctive relationships to the sexual criminal career parameters investigated in this thesis.

Keyphrases: criminologie, sexual assault, developmental model, Confluence Model of Sexual Aggression, sexual criminal career, rapist typology, criminology
La qualité de l’emploi des nouveaux diplômés postsecondaires au Canada : déterminants et évolution dans le temps

This research focuses on job quality of recent Canadian postsecondary graduates. The motivation for this topic is the significant job market shifts, the shortage of skilled workers, and the fact that two out of three Canadians are directly affected by job quality. Using Cloutier’s (2008) typology, the present study has two objectives. The first one is to examine the evolution of job quality of recent Canadian postsecondary graduates between 1992 and 2007. The second objective is to examine the influence that the level of education, field of study and gender have on job quality. Our empirical analyses use data from Statistics Canada’s 1990 and 2005 National Graduates Survey carried out in 1992 and 2007 respectively. Concerning the first objective, our results indicate that three dimensions of job quality, namely salary, job stability and qualifications, declined in 2007 compared to 1992. Concerning the second objective, results show that level of education and field of study are significant determinants of the four dimensions of job quality examined in this study. Indeed, a higher level of education increases annual salary and the probability of working full-time. On the other hand, the probability of having a job that matches the completed program, and the probability of having a permanent position are negatively associated with the level of study. We also find that the job market particularly values domains that allow students to acquire specific (professional) skills. Salary, the likelihood of having full-time work and the probability of job-education match are relatively higher for graduates in these domains. Regarding the impact of gender, our results do not indicate statistical significance for the dimensions of job stability and job-education match. Nevertheless, males earn on average more than females and are more likely to have a full-time employment.

Keyphrases: Canada, Job quality, post-secondary graduates, National Graduates Survey, Canada
De l’immersion à l’engagement, la perspective des concepteurs de jeux vidéo sur l’expérience de jeu

Nowadays, the concept of immersion is widely used or overused by the video game industry to describe new gaming experiences for players, especially when using motion controllers. It is therefore interesting to understand how this concept fits into the process of designing video games and how game developers mobilize this notion. To try to understand how video game designers design their gameplay experiences in this context, we conducted a series of five interviews with designers in the Montreal area. We paid particular attention to interview independent developers and designers working in major studios to obtain a diversity of approaches. We found that game developers are far from sharing the same definition of immersion. Furthermore, this notion is often not directly mobilized by the designers themselves. Indeed, the results of our research have shown that designers use strategies of engagement rather than "immersion". According to our designers, an engaged player means he feels a sincere pleasure in the act in itself of playing.

Keyphrases: Immersion, Engagement, Immersion, Engagement, Presence, Video games, Gameplay experience, Motion controllers, Designers, Design, Video game industry, Gamer
Interprétation des expériences punitives et ses effets sur la délinquance : le cas des infractions routières au Québec

Recent studies indicate that the link between aggregate punishment level (i.e. severity, certainty and celerity of punishment) and perceived punishment level is virtually non-existent. Thus, deterrence-based politics should be avoided because they are ineffective to reduce criminality. However, the deterrence model used in those studies is limited and implies that punishment only produces a deterrent effect. The goal of this study is to test an expanded model of general prevention that integrates the notions of deterrence and normative validation. Based on this model, the preventive effect of punishment could work through the moral beliefs of the potential delinquant, without changing his perceived punishment level. In order to test our model, a survey was conducted among 448 young drivers living in the Province of Quebec, Canada. Results show that deterrence-based variables, like certainty of arrest and perceived severity of punishment, have little to no effect on the intent of the motorist to commit an infraction. However, other inhibitions, such as one's moral beliefs and perceived seriousness of road safety problems (e.g drunk driving and speeding), play an essential role in the decision of the motorist to adopt a law-abiding driving behavior. Yet, these moral beliefs are influenced by the experiences of punishment avoidance, and by the level of policing exposure. These results suggest that a variation in the threat of road sanctions could have a preventive effect without necessarily having an effect on the perceived punishment level of the motorist.

Keyphrases: Deterrence, Road delinquency, Punitive experiences, Punishment avoidance, Normative validation
Défauts et diffusion dans le silicium amorphe

In this work we studied the diffusion phenomenon of copper and silver in a-Si in the presence of hydrogen at room temperature and annealing temperature. The 0.9 μm -thick a-Si layers were formed by ion implantation 28Si + at 500 keV on c-Si (100). After this Cu ions and Ag ions were implanted at 90keV.The heat treatment produces a uniform distribution of impurities in the amorphous layer and the relaxation of substantial defects. Vacancies defects in a-Si can act as traps for the mobility of Cu and Ag. Hydrogen implanted is used to de-trap metal impurities such as Cu and Ag. However we did not detect any diffusion at room temperature during 1 year, but after one year at the annealing temperature (450°C for 1h) we observe the distribution of these metals. Implying that the room at temperature, although the hydrogen de-trapping metals but they could not crossed an energy barrier required to migrate in the network.

Keyphrases: a-Si, c-Si, Lacunes, Ion implantation, Relaxation, SPE rate of recrystallization, a-Si un-relaxed, Diffusion phenomenon, Metallic impurities, gaps, trapping, de-trapping
Propriétés des valeurs propres de ballotement pour contenants symétriques

The study of liquid sloshing in a container is a classical problem of hydrodynamics that has been actively investigated by mathematicians and engineers over the past 150 years. The present thesis is concerned with the properties of eigenfunctions of the two-dimensional sloshing problem on axially symmetric planar domains. Here the axis of symmetry is assumed to be orthogonal to the free surface of the fluid. In particular, we show that the second and the third eigenfunctions of such a problem are, respectively, odd and even with respect to the axial symmetry. There is a well-known conjecture that all eigenvalues of the two-dimensional sloshing problem are simple. Kozlov, Kuznetsov and Motygin [1] proved the simplicity of the first non-zero eigenvalue for domains satisfying the John's condition. In the thesis we show that for axially symmetric planar domains, the first two non-zero eigenvalues of the sloshing problem are simple.

Keyphrases: Eigenfunctions, Eigenvalues, Steklov-Neumann problem
Je (ne) suis (pas) Antigone : les filles et le tragique dans Ça va aller et Fleurs de crachat de Catherine Mavrikakis

This M.A thesis addresses the novels Ça va aller and Fleurs de crachat by Catherine Mavrikakis. It will focus on the ambiguous reappropriation of Antigone in order to question the narrators' expression of identity and the prophetic desire they envision of another future. Divided into two chapters: the first looks into the development of Antigone's heritage and its problematic entry in both literary history and the works of Mavrikakis, while the second takes an interest in the manner of transmission of this heritage through the use of excessive language and a "cannibalist and melancholic" posture. In addition to the questions of transmission, heritage and filiation, this work shows how stemming from the traces of radical feminism, Antigones' girls are destined towards the possibility of being (un)faithful to tragic fate all the while keeping a violent hope of reinventing their future, but especially of breaking through it.

Keyphrases: Antigone, Antigone, Catherine Mavrikakis, Catherine Mavrikakis, Ça va aller, Ça va aller, Feminism, Filiation, Filiation, Girls, Fleurs de crachat, Fleurs de crachat, Contemporary literature, Quebec literature, Tragic
Validation in-vivo des techniques d’élastographie ultrasonore, invasive et non-invasive, à l’aide d’un modèle porcin

It is now widely accepted that plaque composition is a major determinant of plaque’s vulnerability to rupture. Since composition of the plaque affects its mechanical properties, the local assessment of mechanical properties of atherosclerotic plaque may inform us about plaque’s vulnerability. The objective is to compare ultrasonic endovascular elastography (EVE) versus non-invasive vascular elastography (NIVE) according to their potential to identify plaque contents. Intravascular and extravascular acquisitions were performed on carotid arteries of nine hypercholesterolemic minipigs with a 20 MHz catheter and a 7.5 MHz standard probe, respectively. Radial and axial strain values, reported by EVE and NIVE respectively, were correlated with histological area of lipid and calcium for five plaques. Our results demonstrate a good positive correlation between strains and calcified contents (r2=0.82, P-value=0.034 by EVE and r2=0.80, P-value= 0.041 by NIVE). Additionally, there is a strong correlation between axial strains and lipid contents by NIVE (r2=0.92, P-value= 0.010). In conclusion, NIVE and EVE are the potential techniques to identify plaque components and to help physicians to early diagnose the vulnerable plaques.

Keyphrases: plaque vulnérable, vulnerable plaque, non-invasive ultrasound elastography, invasive ultrasound elastography, axial strain, porcine model, histology
Derrida et Bergson : dialogue médiat sur la question de l'immédiat

Although studies of the relation between Derrida and Bergson are few and far between, they nearly all share a common vision: that of attenuating – or even altogether eliminating – the divisions between the two philosophers’ thought, by considering their more fundamental convergences. The following pages will allow us to counterbalance this common interpretation. Without denying the points that Derrida and Bergson do have in common, we will show an important divergence in opinion between the two on the idea that intuition is possible and founded. While Derrida lays doubt on intuitionist doctrine, Bergson establishes intuition as a philosophical method. This thesis examines the motives behind this divergence. Put simply, a comparison of Derridian and Bergsonian thought reveals a partial disagreement that enables fruitful reflection about whether or not intuition is possible. More precisely, we pursue three objectives here: i/ to clearly identify the scope of the disagreement between Derrida and Bergson, often overlooked by previous commentaries, showing that it includes a partial agreement; ii/ to clarify the diverse reasons leading Derrida to deny the very existence of intuition while Bergson embraces intuition as a philosophical method; and iii/ to show that certain Bergsonian arguments, although enjoying a resurge in interest in recent years, appear unable to stand up to several different objections.

Keyphrases: Bergson, Derrida, intuition, deconstruction, duration, partial divide, introspection, false problem, mysticism, art
Statistiques appliquées en chirurgie cardiaque adulte : analyses de survie et applications du “propensity score”

The main objective of this work is to study in depth advanced biostatistical techniques in adult cardiac surgery outcome research.  The studies were designed to incorporate the concepts of survival analysis, regression analysis with propensity score, and cost analysis. The first manuscript assessed survival, and cardiovascular specific mortality, following surgical repair of acute ascending aortic dissection.  The statistical analyses included survival analyses with multiphase parametric hazard regression and other parametric (exponential, Weibull), semi-parametric (Cox) or non-parametric models (Kaplan Meier), comparison with the survival of a matched cohort for age, gender and race using State lifetables, and modelization with bootstrapping and multinomial logit models.  The study showed that the early and late survival following surgical repair has improved progressively over 25 years in association with noticeable changes in surgical techniques and preoperative diagnostic testing. The second manuscript focused on outcomes following isolated coronary artery bypass grafting in patients with a history of percutaneous coronary intervention.  The statistical analyses included multivariable regression models with propensity score, complex matching algorithm (1:3) and appropriate statistical analyses for matched groups (standardized differences, generalized estimating equations, and survival analyses with stratified proportional hazards models).  The study showed that remote prior percutaneous coronary intervention more than 14 days before coronary artery bypass grafting surgery was not associated with adverse outcomes at short or long-term follow-up. The third manuscript evaluated the financial consequences and the changes in case mix that occurred at an academic medical center subsequent to the implementation of a satellite cardiac surgery program.  The statistical analyses included two-way ANOVA multivariable regression models (logistic, linear or ordinal), propensity score, and cost analyses using Log-Normal parametric models.  “Survival” analyses models were also explored, using “cost” instead of “time” as the outcome of interest, and led to similar conclusions.  The study showed that, after implementation of the satellite cardiac surgery program, fewer patients of lower complexity came to the academic medical center from the satellite program area, with a significant increase in nursing workload and costs.

Keyphrases: Acute type A aortic dissection, Bypass, revascularization, Cardiac surgery, Coronary angioplasty, Cost analysis, Epidemiologic methods, Follow-up studies, Health economics, Statistics, regression analysis, Survival analysis