Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Application Of Environmental Impact Assessment Legislation To The 2010 Winter Olympic Games Venue And Infastructure Development, Daniel Melbourne Patterson Kellar

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a tool which aims to make developments better by identifying, avoiding, and mitigating potential negative environmental impacts of projects and other action. With the 2010 Winter Olympic Games being held in the Vancouver to Whistler (sea-to-sky) corridor many developments have been initiated and EIA has played a role in 2010 site construction. Using case study analysis, legislative and literature reviews as well as open-ended interviews with key participants, stakeholders, and partners in the environmental impact assessment process, this study investigated the application of Canada’s and British Columbia’s environmental impact assessment legislations to the 2010 Olympic …

Hydrological Response Patterns And Solute Flux In Canadian Shield Basins: Role Of Different Physical Features And Antecedent Moisture Conditions, Jessica Mueller

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Patterns of stream flow in relatively undisturbed Canadian Shield basins are closely linked to their physical and vegetative characteristics and meteorological conditions. The physical characteristics include topography, soil-till composition, depth and structure, slope morphology and bedrock geology. Hydrological flowpaths through, and in-situ chemical processes in the soil-till matrix are influenced greatly by the composition of these features and by the antecedent hydrological conditions preceding a given storm or snowmelt event.

A long term data set, collected by the Dorset Environmental Science Centre, is used to examine eight forested basins within the Muskoka-Haliburton region of south-central Ontario. The basins have a …

A Critical Examination Of Sustainability Considerations In Yukon Environmental Assessment—Past And Present, Louisa M. Clementino

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The Northern regions of Canada, as a result of landscape characteristics and political and cultural dynamics, present unique challenges and opportunities for meeting sustainability goals through environmental assessment (EA) processes. In order to understand the significance of the EA process in the North and its applicability to fulfilling sustainability goals, the past and present EA regimes of the Yukon are evaluated adopting a sustainability-focused framework. Unique changes to the Yukon EA process, as a result of land claim agreements and devolution have created innovative structures and processes, reflective of the environmental, socio-economic, cultural and political circumstances of the region. The …

Modelling Asset Prices Under Regime Switching Diffusions Via First Passage Time, Xiaojing Xi

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In this thesis we focus on the development of a new class of stochastic models for asset price processes and their application to option pricing and hedging. The asset price process involves analytical treatments for calculating first-hitting (or first-passage) times for a regular diffusion with killing in combination with Markov state-switching. The dynamics is naturally dictated by the underlying diffusion process itself rather than arising from some addition exogenous process. To date, this class of asset pricing models appears to be novel in the literature and, moreover, offers a significant to the standard geometric Brownian motion commonly used in the …

Web Search Algorithms And Pagerank, Laleh Samarbakhsh

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The mathematical theory underlying the Google search engine is the PageRank algorithm, first introduced by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, the founders of Google. A ranking of web pages is made considering many criteria. PageRank exploits the graph structure of the web. The web’s hyperlink structure forms a massive directed graph, where the web pages are presented as nodes and hyperlinks as edges. The PageRank equation finds a score by solving a recursive equation which calculates the PageRank vector. The PageRank vector is the stationary distribution of an ergodic Markov chain. The Perron-Frobenius theorem ensures that the primitive matrix produced …