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Access status: Open Access ,
Environmental legacies of lumber mill operations in Callander Bay, Lake Nipissing
(2025) Reid, Cole T.
Lumbering activities, on Callander Bay of Lake Nipissing, Ontario, were revisited to explore how legacies from its once ‘frontier industry’ could be implicated in its cyanobacterial Harmful Algal Blooms (cHABs). Since ~1930, cyanobacteria have bloomed with increasing prevalence in Callander’s freshwater embayment, with 10 blooms reported from 2011-2024. Bridging water quality science with local history, this interdisciplinary study chronicles events of industrial mill operations on Callander Bay (1880s-present) as potential precursors to modern cHABs. Analysis of archival content revealed history of an environment highly affected by lumber mills which processed hundred-millions of board feet per year. Past mill operations with their supportive industries of navigable steamships and locomotion were Callander’s prominent economic drivers at local to national scales – where soot-laden smoke once signalled opening Ontario’s North. Despite being outward symbols of momentum, Callander’s mills had largely closed by 1968 but continued into the 2000s. Subsequently, the lumbering era, which had brought economic prosperity, left behind contamination, degradation, and cultural heritage artifacts within the Callander Bay watershed.
Access status: Open Access ,
Lorentz Invariant Equations for Multiplets and Their Gauge
(Canadian Science Publishing, 2025-09-13) Humi, Mayer
This paper explores the existence of kinematical gauge transformations for Lorentz invariant equations which describe a multiplet of two spin 1 2 particles. For this multiplet the additional gauge invariance can be in form of three different groups of transformation. This gauge is absent when the particles are treated separately. Some basic properties of the solutions for these "multiplet equations" are analyzed.
Access status: Open Access ,
MITIGATING SCOUR IN AGING RUN-OF-RIVER HYDROPOWER INFRASTRUCTURE: AN ANALYSIS OF PRESSURE FLUCTUATIONS IN THE PHYSICAL MODEL OF CHANCY-POUGNY (SWITZERLAND)
(Canadian Science Publishing, 2025-09-17) Kurth, Tobias; Wüthrich, Davide Wüthrich; Duarte, Rafael; De Cesare, Giovanni
Many run-of-river hydropower plants built without stilling basins now experience progressive scour due to prolonged operation and increasingly frequent floods. The Chancy-Pougny dam on the Rhône River, constructed in the 1920s at the Swiss–French border, exemplifies this issue. Severe flow recirculation was identified as the main cause of erosion, with pressure fluctuations increasing between the original and current stilling basin. While earlier work developed scour protection measures through physical modelling and numerical predictions, the present study focuses on analyzing pressure measurements within the stilling basin to assess how fluctuations can be reduced to limit future scour. Effective mitigation strategies include: (1) raising the basin water level, (2) introducing a guidance wall to restore symmetrical flow, and (3) adding various configurations of half-cube concrete prisms to increase roughness and energy dissipation. A Life Cycle Assessment of prism materials and construction methods further supports a sustainable approach to rehabilitating ageing hydraulic infrastructure.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Associations of Individual Characteristics and Kindergarten Context with Student Positional Math Achievement Trajectories in Ontario
(2025-06) Ameli, Fatemeh; Davies, Scott SD; Leadership, Higher and Adult Education
Educational policymakers need to understand individual and contextual predictors of children’s achievement to inform their decision-making and guide their interventions' timing, type, and target populations. The Bronfenbrenner model provides a useful guide for generating quality research on the topic; it takes a developmental approach to children’s outcomes and highlights both proximate factors, such as early capacities and attributes of families, as well as distal factors, such as neighbourhoods, schools, and regions. American educational research has supported this model by demonstrating that achievement disparities emerge by age six, persist through primary and secondary grades, and are influenced by both proximate and distal factors. In Canada, research is limited on the emergence of achievement disparities and their continuation over children’s schooling careers, as well as the key predictors of those trajectories. Comparing magnitudes of individual versus contextual predictors is crucial to inform targeted policy interventions. Canada lacks a population-level national longitudinal dataset tracking students from primary to secondary grades. While some provinces have linked administrative databases to create longitudinal datasets, Ontario has lacked quality data on long-term achievement trajectories. My dissertation uses a unique Ontario-wide dataset created by linking several provincial databases, tracking math achievement from kindergarten through grades 3, 6, and 9 for 30,000 students using a retrospective longitudinal approach and various statistical methods. Multilevel growth models and multiple regression models suggest three key findings. First, kindergarten capacities, especially language/cognitive readiness, significantly impact their math achievements through to grade 9, surpassing the influence of school type and size in kindergarten. Second, aggregate-level disparities by sex and socioeconomic status are relatively stable and persist over all grades. Third, comparisons of the amount of variance in achievement across levels of aggregation suggest that most variation emerges between students rather than between school types or boards. These findings suggest that early grades, including preschool years, are critical periods for academic development. As such, I recommend interventions aimed at ameliorating educational disparities that i) target students’ cognitive/language capacities, along with some non-cognitive capacities, ii) are implemented during student early grades, and iii) are delivered universally across all schools, targeting all lower achievers.
Access status: Open Access ,
Montaigne and Hobbes: Two Political Philosophies of Mere Life
(2023-11) Xia, Erfan; Orwin, Clifford; Political Science
In this dissertation, I explore the ethical-political vision of “mere life” in Montaigne and Hobbes. I mean by “mere life” the enjoyment of natural pleasures inherent in human and animal life. Both Montaigne and Hobbes argue that the way of mere life is based on knowledge and desirable, and they propose political arrangements that accommodate it. My reading of Montaigne and Hobbes means to show that there is a positive and moderate conception of human good as mere life underlying modern political philosophy and modern life. Throughout our discussion, we see that Montaigne and Hobbes wrestle with Aristotelianism. The attraction of mere life finds a clear early expression in Aristotle’s almost poetic description of “life in itself” as “containing some sort of inherent joy and natural sweetness.” However, the disenfranchisement of mere life as a possible candidate for a worthy and coherent understanding of human life is also already in Aristotle. It is indeed against Aristotelian political philosophy of the good life Montaigne and Hobbes articulate their political philosophies of mere life as a more humane alternative. In the first three chapters, I will discuss (1) Montaigne’s critique of scholastic natural law and his new conception of natural law inspired by American indigenous people, (2) his skeptic solution to the theological-political problem and his ethic of mere life, (3) his anti-Aristotelian conception of human individual and the political arrangements for such individuals. In Chapters (4) and (5), I discuss Hobbes’ anti-Aristotelian accounts of human action and human happiness. In chapter (6), I discuss how Hobbes facilitates enjoyment of mere life in political society with the use of fear and the laws of nature as mores and compare Montaigne’s and Hobbes’ political arrangements; moreover, I also reflect on the tension between individual enjoyment of mere life and the inherent need of social cohesion in political society.