NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Constructions et représentation de la classe ouvrière du Nord du Québec à Fermont

In an increasingly globalized world, where the capitalist model is ubiquitous, the central question in the attempt at group classification concerns the link between the commercialization of a work force and the social stratification of the population in terms of class, gender, and ethnicity. The growing demands of globalization lead to new and innovative modes of production, which in turn transform the dynamics involved in defining and regulating populations. In current national affairs in Canada, this is best exemplified in the debate over the exploitation of Quebec's northern resources.  The project to exploit Quebec's northern riches is a relatively recent phenomenon; the process whereby a social class is formed, however, is not. Given the vicissitudes of this process, it seems pertinent to reexamine the economic, sociological and historical elements which influenced the theoretical discourse on a social class whose existence is intrinsically linked with the exploitation of natural resources, namely the workers of northern Quebec.  In Fermont, a town located in northern Quebec, mining companies have employed since 2011 a large number of workers coming from other regions of Quebec, known as permanent non-residents. Thus, the balance of the social structure maintained by the local workers is faced with new dynamics of social geographic mobility. In the workplace, women and Native Americans are also affected by the power relations at the interpersonal level in daily life owing to the fact that the jobs in the industrial mining sector and in construction are socially and historically founded on specific social and cultural traits (namely, white and male). The working class of northern Quebec is therefore redefined in its relationships to the permanent non-resident workers as well to its gender and indigenous minorities, relationships which will doubtless engender a complex and heterogeneous social structure.

Keyphrases: Fermont, Social Class, Working Class, Mining, Gender, Ethnicity, Non- Redidential Permanent Workers (Fly- in/ Fly- out), Northern Quebec, Fermont
A unified framework for the comprehension of software's time dimension

Software systems are getting more and more complex and are developed by teams that are constantly changing and not necessarily working in the same location. Moreover, most software systems, nowadays, are recycled rather than being developed from scratch. A comprehension task is crucial when performing maintenance tasks; it consists of analyzing multiple software dimensions concurrently. Time is one of these dimensions, as software changes its state with time in two manners: during their execution and during their evolution. These changes make sense only when analyzed within the context of other software dimensions, such as structure or bug information. Multidimensional analysis is a difficult problem to solve. However, there are certain methods that bypass this difficulty, such as semi-automatic approaches. Software visualization is one of them, as it allows being part of the analysis by exploring and guiding information search. The first stage of the thesis consists of applying visualization techniques to better understand software dynamicity during execution and evolution. Changes over time are represented by heat maps. Hence, we utilize the same graphical representation to visualize both change types over time. Other approaches that permit the analysis of a program’s dynamic behavior over time involve the use of heuristics. In the thesis’ second stage, we are interested in the identification of the programs’ execution phases and evolution patterns using the same approach, i.e. search-based optimisation. In this context, the premise is the existence of internal cohesion between change events that allow the clustering in phases. This hypothesis of cohesion is defined specifically for change events in the code during software evolution and state changes during program execution. This thesis’ main objective is to study the unification of these two time dimensions, evolution and execution, in an attempt to bring together two research domains that work on the same set of problems, but from two different perspectives.

Keyphrases: Software maintenance, Software comprehension, Software visualization, Program execution, Software evolution
Le "sacré noir" chez Georges Bataille et Hubert Aquin

Affinities link Hubert Aquin’s and Georges Bataille’s writings. These two authors explore a mystic path, which presents strong similarities related to what Roger Caillois called «left sacred», that is to say the impure, malefic sacred, accessible to Georges Bataille by transgression, and which corresponds to the « privileged moment of communal unity ». The French author’s goal is to free the mystic experience from its religious background and to make ecstasy accessible to everybody. It is precisely by communicating that men can break their isolation and that of the others and reach ecstasy. Even if Hubert Aquin doesn’t share the same cultural background as Georges Bataille, he also theorizes and represents in his novels a form of « extreme of the possible », which is very close to the bataillian « impossible ». This thesis aims to show how Georges Bataille’s theories of «inner experience » and eroticism highlight Hubert Aquin’s essays, Journal and novels, leading us to define the peculiarities of the mystic experience explored by the author from Quebec, and more generally and fundamentally, to focus on two different ways to think and to live the refusal of transcendence: the first, that of Georges Bataille, which consists in embracing the loss of God and of ourselves in laughter, and the second one, that of Hubert Aquin, which consists in being ceaselessly and painfully torn between what takes away from the Christ and what moves closer to Him. The first chapter of the thesis is theoretical; it is dedicated to three key concepts for our whole analysis: mysticism, sacred and eroticism. The object of the second chapter is the peculiarity of the new mystic theology of Georges Bataille in his theoretical texts compared to the traditional mystic experience. The third and last chapter shows the points of convergence and the differences between the French author and the author from Quebec and emphasizes the specificity of the latter’s experience. How does Hubert Aquin conceive and represent «the extreme of the possible » in his writings? It is the ultimate question we try to answer in this thesis.

Keyphrases: Georges Bataille, Hubert Aquin, Sacred, Eroticism, Mysticism, Transgression
Navettage et épuisement professionnel selon la région et le moyen de transport : les résultats de l'étude SALVEO

The main goal of the thesis was to study the relationship between commuting and burnout. Specifically, we assessed the moderation effect of both the mode of transportation and the workplace areas, distincly and simultaneously, on the relationship between commuting duration and distance with burnout, Burnout was measured using the MBI-GS (Maslah Burnout Inventory-General Survey). Data was collected during the SALVEO Canadian study by the Équipe de Recherche sur le Travail et la Santé Mentale (ERTSM) between 2009 and 2012 in 63 workplaces. 2,162 employees participated, resulting in a response rate of 71.3%. The multiple regression analysis performed are among the firsts to significantly associate commuting to burnout. Indeed, commuters who work in large urban areas are significantly more emotionally exhausted than workers in small urban or rural areas. There is a curvilinear relationship between commuting time and dimension of cynicism. A curvilinear relation also exists between commuting time and the overall measure of burnout. Finally, the means of transport as well as the workplace area simultaneously moderate the relationship between commuting time and dimension of inefficacy. Overall, results suggest that the stress of commuting comes from the daily adjustment of workers to their commuting conditions, which is reflected in employment. Organizations should therefore be interested in the development of human resources management practices focusing on improving their employees' commuting conditions. These HR practices could modulate the relationship between commuting and mental health problems at work.

Keyphrases: Job burnout, Commuting, Area, Work stress, Mode of transportation
Marcel Pepin, l’homme du contre-pouvoir

This research on the thought of Marcel Pepin presents this important labor-union leader and shows his contribution as a player in the industrial relations system in the second half of the twentieth century.  Inspired by the work of Fernand Dumont and Louis-Marie Tremblay, which focused namely on ideology and philosophy of Quebec’s unionism movement, this research examines the thought of Marcel Pepin in the following three dimensions: self-definition, the definition of the environment and the definition of the relationship between self and others. Some fifty indicators grouped within thirteen components allow to refine this content analysis.  The documents analysed here are mainly writings by Marcel Pepin, including the moral reports that he produced while presiding the CSN, as well as numerous texts presented as a speaker, university professor and as president of the Mouvement socialiste.   Ardent unionist, his actions aimed at greater social and economic justice. Man of great rigor, he knew how to bind the intellectual aspect of his thought to concrete actions on the ground. He believed that unionism, through the CSN, was the most appropriate vehicle to bring new ideas and methods to change the system in place.  Called upon to exercise a leader’s role throughout his career, he has skillfully exerted a management focused on intelligence and respect in order to create the against-power essential to the achievement of this ideals. This research also allows us to see the interrelationship between a leader and his organization.

Keyphrases: Marcel Pepin, CSN, Leadership, Marcel Pepin, Industrial relations, Labour relations, Unions, CSN, Leadership, Labour union thought, Quebec politics, Socialism, World confederation of labour (WCL)
Les facteurs et les conditions organisationnelles favorisant la motivation des enseignants du primaire et du secondaire dans leur développement professionnel
lié à l’intégration des TIC

This research looks deeply in the context of knowledge societies and the necessity of learning and continuing professional development. It also deals with the motivational dynamics that lead teachers in the professional learning process, that is to say, when they have to accomplish activities in the part of a continuing professional development. The objectives of this research are: to develop and to validate a scale that measures satisfaction of basic psychological needs as a part of a continuing professional development linked to the integration of the ITC with primary and high school teachers; to determine the satisfaction degree of the basic psychological needs of teachers in the context of continuing professional development of the integration of ITC; to identify the activities and the organisational conditions favouring motivation of teachers in primary and high schools in their professional development of ITC integration. To accomplish our research objectives, we used a mix type methodology, which combined using closed questionnaires (64 participants) for the quantitative analysis and using individual interviews (5 participants) for the qualitative data collection.  Despite certain conceptual and methodological limits, the results of our study indicate that autonomy, feeling of competency and social membership, as well as relevance of training activities are the determinant factors of the satisfaction and motivation in professional development. Besides, the results of this study open the path to more studies concerning professional development and propose prospective research ideas.

Keyphrases: Motivation, Professional development, Satisfaction of psychological needs, Integration of ICT, Training
La décentralisation au Niger : le cas de la mobilisation des ressources financières dans la ville de Niamey

Decentralization began in 2004 in Niger, aims to promote development "from below" and spreading democratic principles in local communities, in order to improve the living conditions of populations. Research available shows a considerable gap between goals and achievements of decentralization. Factors presented by researchers to explain this difference are the weak technical and financial support of the State toward local authorities, or the quasi-absence of a qualified local civil service, able to support decentralization projects. However, these arguments are insufficient to explain the difficulties encountered by decentralization actors. Thus, I argue that political parties play a key role in the decentralization process. They disseminate political influence strategies and patronage practices in local arenas. Therefore, their strategies hinder local actors’ actions, especially their ability to mobilize financial resources.

Keyphrases: Niger, Decentralization, Local actors, Mobilization of financial resources, State capacity, Political parties
Le tonneau des Danaïdes ou de l’européanisation à l’Est : la grande corruption en Roumanie – types, causes, conséquences

Why does Romania fail the Europeanization test? Using four case studies, this thesis emphasizes the central role played by political parties in the development of corruption in Romania. By adapting the theory first developed by Jonathan Pinto, Carrie Leana and Frits Pil, it shows that the most common type of corruption is not individual but organizational and spreads through political parties. More precisely, the case studies are used to compare the phenomena of Corrupt Organization (CO) and Organization of Corrupt Individuals (OCI), respectively. In Romania, the two types coexist. However, due to its extent and strength revealed by the case studies, the phenomenon of Corrupt Organization in its manifestation within political parties has more negative consequences on the economic and political development as well as on the European integration of the country.

Keyphrases: Grande corruption, Corruption, Romania, Europeanization, Organization of corrupt individuals, Corrupt organization, Political parties
Apprentissage des réseaux de neurones profonds et applications en traitement automatique de la langue naturelle

Machine learning aims to leverage data in order for computers to solve problems of interest. Despite being invented close to sixty years ago, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) remain an area of active research and a powerful tool. Their resurgence in the context of deep learning has led to dramatic improvements in various domains from computer vision and speech processing to natural language processing.  The quantity of available data and the computing power are always increasing, which is desirable to train high capacity models such as deep ANNs. However, some intrinsic learning difficulties, such as local minima, remain problematic. Deep learning aims to find solutions to these problems, either by adding some regularisation or improving optimisation.  Unsupervised pre-training or Dropout are examples of such solutions.  The two first articles presented in this thesis follow this line of research. The first analyzes the problem of vanishing/exploding gradients in deep architectures. It shows that simple choices, like the activation function or the weights initialization, can have an important impact. We propose the normalized initialization scheme to improve learning. The second focuses on the activation function, where we propose the rectified linear unit. This work was the first to emphasise the use of linear by parts activation functions for deep supervised neural networks, which is now an essential component of such models.  The last two papers show some applications of ANNs to Natural Language Processing. The first focuses on the specific subject of domain adaptation in the context of sentiment analysis, using Stacked Denoising Auto-encoders. It remains state of the art to this day. The second tackles learning with multi-relational data using an energy based model which can also be applied to the task of word-sense disambiguation.

Keyphrases: Artificial neural networks, Deep learning, Natural language processing, Rectified linear units, Domain adaptation, Sentiment analysis, Multi-relational data, Word-sense disambiguation, Weights initialization
L'itinéraire philosophique d'Hilary Putnam, des mathématiques à l'éthique

In this dissertation I propose a new reading of the philosophical itinerary of Hilary Putnam on the matter of realism. In essence, my purpose is to argue that there is much more continuity than is normally understood, and even a degree of permanence, in the way in which Putnam has viewed the question of realism throughout his career. To arrive at this interpretation of Putnam I essentially followed two veins in his work. First, in a volume published in the early 2000s entitled Ethics without Ontology (2004), Putnam establishes a parallel between his conception of objectivity in the philosophy of mathematics and in ethics. The second vein comes from a comment he made in the introduction to the first volume of his Philosophical Papers (1975) to the effect that the kind of realism he presupposed in his work of the 1960s and 70s was the same that he upheld in the philosophy of mathematics and wished to argue for at a later date in ethics.  Following the first vein makes it possible to better grasp Putnam’s general conception of objectivity, but in order to understand how such a conception of objectivity is not unique to mathematics but is instead a general conception of objectivity one must follow the second vein. There, in the 1960s and 70s, Putnam adopted the same kind of realism in the philosophy of science and in ethics as he had in the philosophy of mathematics. Following this path, one realises that there exists a very strong structural similarity between Putnam’s first realism and his internal realism.  After establishing this connection between Putnam’s first and second realism, I draw on Putnam’s remarks and compare the internal realism discourse to his current realism (the natural realism of ordinary people) to demonstrate, contrary to the prevalent interpretation, that there has been a great deal of consistency in his conception of realism from the 1960s to the present day.   I conclude the dissertation by demonstrating how my new interpretation of Putnam’s philosophical itinerary makes it possible to shed light on the kind of realism he wishes to champion in ethics.

Keyphrases: Hilary Putnam, realism, metaphysical realism, internal realism, natural realism of the common man, philosophy of mathematics, ethics, metaethics, objectivity, objectivity without objects
Maurice Sand, un créateur fantastique méconnu : la transversalité, brisant d’une œuvre au 19e siècle

Aside from fleeting, inattentive glances at his illustration work and his puppet theatre, cultural and literary history has generally taken little notice of Maurice Sand except as the beloved son of the most famous woman writer of the 19th century. Yet considered on its own merits, his multidisciplinary work—in painting, drawing, illustration, theatre, art history, natural science—forms a very coherent whole, indicative of sustained creativity, rather than the dilettantism of which he is often accused. From this perspective, Maurice Sand appears to be one of those individuals whose work lies in the interstitial space between major literary and artistic narratives and who, though seemingly minor figures, prompt nuanced reflection on how those narratives are constructed. An exploration of his case is an opportunity for a closer examination of the mechanisms of misappreciation that affected, and can still affect, a creator and oeuvre that have fallen victim to the arbiters of memory. Some of those mechanisms have clearly turned various points in his career and posthumous traces into discrete blind spots of history. First, the extensive corpus of studies on George Sand, especially biographical and autobiographical writings, demonstrates how the recollection of someone constructed from the positions of others can be distorted: his existence becomes a cliché, gradually reduced to a mere adjunct to past or current discussions of his mother, which overlook his independent career and life. Second, bringing his oeuvre to light, so it can at last be seen as a whole, reveals an even more significant cause of history’s misappreciation of him. Virtually all Maurice Sand’s works are not only shot through with the fantastic, but also marked by his interest in the sciences of metamorphosis, from ethnogeny to entomology. Constantly reinventing the past, his cognitive and creative processes ignored boundaries between disciplines, embracing hybrid, composite subjects. The inherently transversal nature of his work, which made it totally unacceptable in a century that saw it as indicative of a lack of focus, is now paradoxically viewed as a mark of superior quality in the fragmented field of the arts today.

Keyphrases: Sciences, Cultural history, Sandian studies, Memory, Misappreciation, Minor figure, Fantastic, Science, Metamorphosis, Multidisciplinarity, Transversality
Effet des macrophytes aquatiques sur le traitement d’eau contaminée à l’ACC et au PCP

The main objective of this project is to evaluate the capacity of a combined constructed wetland system to treat a leachate polluted with two wood preservatives-chromium copper arsenate (CCA) and pentachlorophenol (PCP)- according a particular importance to the role of plants. The effect of the exposure concentration on four macrophytes species (Typha angustifolia, Phalaris arundinacea, Phragmites australis americanus and Phragmites australis australis) was evaluated using a pot experiment. Four HSSF pilot constructed wetlands, planted with one of these plants species, were monitored. The role of an HSSF constructed wetland, planted with willow (Salix Miyabeana SX67), placed at the end of the treatment chain was also assessed. The plants growth and survival and their bioaccumulation capacity were measured, and the system treatment efficiencies were monitored. There was no effect of the concentration on plants growth but the higher exposure concentration resulted in a higher bioaccumulation in the roots of the four macrophytes. All four pilots CW showed treatment efficiencies superior to 55% in 2013 and to 82% in 2014 for the pollutants tested. The willows CW have the theorical capacity to evapotranspirate up to 1200 L of water. Its treatments efficiencies were over 59% for all the pollutants tested. A combined constructed wetland system is a good alternative to conventional methods to treat a leachate polluted with wood preservatives.

Keyphrases: Macrophytes, ACC, PCP, Furanes, CCA, Dioxins, Furans, Constructed wetlands, Phytoremediation