22962 research outputs found
Sort by
'For ye haue the poore alwaies with you’: Experiments in Charity in post-Reformation Oxford and Aberdeen, 1560-1640
No full textWhen the Reformation swept through England and Scotland, it led to the rapid dismantling of the Catholic infrastructure in both kingdoms, including the systems that oversaw and provided charitable works. This loss of eleemosynary infrastructure coincided with the rapid increase of poverty and the rise of the bureaucratic state across Europe. As a result, the newly Protestant regions needed to develop new methods for caring for the poor. This dissertation examines how these efforts to experiment with new forms of charitable works occurred at the local level in England and Scotland by comparing the burgh of Aberdeen and the city of Oxford. The two towns had significantly divergent outcomes in the scale and breadth of their poor relief schemes after their Reformations. Aberdeen’s experiments with charitable works were far more successful than Oxford's in terms of the number of people assisted and the amounts of money given to the poor. Notably, this overall success in Aberdeen compared to Oxford runs counter to prevailing narratives about the strengths and weaknesses of national developments in poor relief in the two kingdoms. The dissertation argues that local variables are crucial for understanding how charity developed in the new religious and political contexts of the two kingdoms. It does so by using a combination of local political and religious documents from the towns, particularly financial records that reveal official policies and how the cities fundraised and spent on charity. It begins by analyzing the towns’ frameworks that undergirded the new forms of charity, then compares their experiments across broad categories of relief. These include institutional charities, regularized relief, discipline and correction of the poor, and the provision of charity during
crises. In doing so, it reveals national and local perceptions of the poor and the poor’s identities as individuals with agency and unique experiences.University of Guelph2027-01-0
Development of a vaginal canal measurement tool and ultrasound compatible model to guide the design of patient-specific pessaries
No full textPelvic Organ Prolapse (POP) management relies on subjective diagnostic measurements and inefficient trial-and-error pessary fitting. This thesis establishes a patient-specific engineering workflow to address these limitations. First, a mechanical introitus measurement tool was prototyped using Selective laser sintering (SLS). Although measuring differently than digital calipers, it demonstrated feasibility for standardizing internal assessments. Second, a parametric manufacturing pipeline for personalized silicone pessaries was developed using 3D-printed molds. Finally, a high-fidelity, ultrasound compatible pelvic phantom was engineered to validate these technologies. Using a novel sacrificial tooling technique, the phantom integrated a realistic introitus and a rigid, 3D printed pubic symphysis within a ballistics gel matrix. Industrial validation confirmed the model’s anatomical and acoustic fidelity. Collectively, these innovations transform POP care by replacing subjective assessment with a rigorous, data-driven methodology. model’s anatomical and acoustic fidelity. Collectively, these innovations transform POP care by replacing subjective assessment with a rigorous, data-driven methodology.Mitacs2027-02-2
An Exploration of the Role of Fibronectin in the Anti-Metastatic Properties of Verteporfin in Osteosarcoma
No full textOsteosarcoma (OS) is the most common primary bone cancer; prognosis is poor for patients with metastatic OS due to few treatments, suggesting the need for additional therapies. Previous work with verteporfin (VP) highlighted its ability to inhibit growth of metastatic K7M2 OS cells alongside an increase in tissue stiffness. Fibronectin (FN1) was investigated as a mediator of this effect via analysis of K7M2 cells following VP treatment. This study also investigated the effects of FN1 on cellular proliferation, and how extracellular matrix stiffness contributes to FN1 expression and proliferation. Results indicate that FN1 is increased in K7M2 cells following VP treatment via a YAP-mediated mechanism. Additionally, blocking of FN1 RGD motifs is suggested to negatively affect proliferation. Testing with soft substrates resulted in a modulation of FN1 localization, and VP treatment didn’t increase FN1 expression. Furthermore, new findings with RGD blocking suggest the motif’s involvement in VP’s anti-proliferative effects.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaMitacsUniversity of Guelph2026-12-1
Does Processing and Chopping of Low-quality Forage Impact Gestating Beef Cow Performance and Enteric Methane Emissions?
Full text linkThe objective of this study was to investigate the use of bale processing technology for low-quality forage and its impact on performance, digestibility, feed intake, sorting behaviour, and enteric methane in gestating beef cows. Eighty-two multiparous Angus cows were enrolled 77 ± 9.0 days before calving and randomly assigned to a dietary treatment of short wheat straw (SS: ~ 5 cm) or long wheat straw (LS: ~ 18 cm). SS-fed cows tended to have higher dry matter intake and sorted less against larger particles. The SS cows were able to maintain higher levels of rib fat deposition during late gestation and had indications of higher digestibility of dry matter, total digestible nutrients, and crude protein. No difference in daily methane yield (g/kg DMI) was detected. This work provides support for the chopping of low-quality forages to help maintain feed intake, animal performance, and reduce sorting behaviour of gestating beef cows
Non-Invasive Human Fatigue Estimation Based on Motion Analysis
No full textOccupational fatigue poses significant risks in industrial settings, yet scalable physiological monitoring remains difficult to deploy. This thesis addresses that need through two complementary components. The first develops a multimodal-to-inertial knowledge-transfer framework that enriches inertial representations; on WESAD, centered-kernel alignment improves from 0.61 for a supervised baseline to 0.88 for the distilled model, indicating a substantial gain in physiological relevance under single-sensor constraints. The second introduces a lightweight vision-based framework that converts monocular video into stable 3D joint kinematics, providing a more convenient and nonintrusive source of fatigue-related information. On Human3.6M, the model achieves a P1 MPJPE of 41.3 mm while maintaining a lightweight design suitable for practical deployment. Together, the two components form an integrated pathway in which enriched inertial embeddings and visual kinematics jointly support continuous and minimally intrusive fatigue assessment in industrial environments.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada2026-12-1
Linking individual aromatic compound toxicity to whole oil impacts in the Pacific purple sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus)
Full text linkMarine shipping consumes and transports petroleum products. The Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) First Nation identified a need to assess impacts of these products to inform spill mitigation in their territory. Testing aromatic compounds (ACs), primary drivers of petroleum toxicity, allows for modelling of broader impacts. In collaboration with and by request of the Nation, this study assesses acute toxicity of four ACs and three petroleum products on fertilization success in the Pacific purple sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus), an ecologically and culturally significant invertebrate. Individual ACs spanned logKOW values from 2.9–4.5; oil products included marine diesel, diluted bitumen, and low-sulfur fuel. Gametes were exposed to known concentrations before assessment of fertilization success. Individual AC exposures caused significant declines in fertilization success, whereas oil products produced no detectable changes. These findings demonstrate that individual ACs can drive toxicity in S. purpuratus, while complex petroleum mixtures were insufficient to affect fertilization under laboratory conditions
SacTrace: an Interpretable Architecture for Assessing Contributions of Saccade Trajectories to Fixation Prediction
Full text linkHuman eye movements reflect an interplay between image-driven selection and motor planning, yet most salience and scanpath models focus only on fixation-based features. This study presents the SacTrace architecture, an interpretable fixation-prediction framework for the systematic investigation of feature use throughout the modelling process. The primary point of interest for the study is the evaluation of saccade trajectories and their utility for the prediction of human eye movement patterns. The architecture uses structured feature categories to explicitly condition visual representations on each category via Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) modules and explores their spatial relevance through cross attention. SacTrace also integrates temporal context with a Convolutional Long-Short Term Memory (ConvLSTM) network and produces probabilistic fixation estimates with a Mixture Density Network (MDN) readout. Using a dataset that provided raw eye-tracking data, we perform ablative, FiLM-parameter, and attention-map diagnostics to evaluate how trajectory features groups contribute to localization accuracy and saccade plausibility. Across analyses, trajectory inputs acted as an image-conditioned balancing signal: ablating trajectories had minimal impact on localization but substantially degraded amplitude/angle plausibility, whereas spatial feature ablation sharply reduced localization performance. Temporal-FiLM and attention diagnostics revealed that trajectory conditioning interacts differentially with hierarchical visual representations. The potential underlying neural signals captured by the trajectories are discussed along with dataset limitations, and avenues for improving trajectory encoding. The results suggest that incorporating learned, trajectory-derived priors alongside spatial image features yields more behaviorally consistent fixation predictions and provides a diagnostic pathway for linking model components to plausible oculomotor mechanisms
An Exploration of the Initial Canine Cancer Cellular Response to Treatment with the Novel Fc3TSR Therapeutic
Full text linkSolid tumors across species share several common characteristics, such as heterogeneity, a chaotic TME, and disorganized vasculature. Our lab developed the vascular normalization agent, Fc3TSR, a fusion protein consisting of two 3TSR segments of a type-1 thrombospondin (TSP-1) protein bound to the heavy chains of the Fc region of a human IgG antibody (Fc-IgG). We hypothesize that Fc3TSR will induce apoptosis in canine cancer cells, and that CD36 will mediate this effect. Cellular viability assays show that Fc3TSR causes a significant cytotoxic effect in canine cell lines cultures of lung adenocarcinoma, melanoma, and osteosarcoma, but not in hemangiosarcoma. A CD36 knockout ID8 murine cell line was developed to elucidate the role of CD36 in Fc3TSR action, and it was found that the cytotoxic effect of Fc3TSR was still present in CD36 null cells. These data indicate the merits of further canine study using Fc3TSR in cancers characterized by solid tumors
Navigating the Unknown Arabic-speaking newcomers overcoming barriers to integration in Guelph - Southern Ontario
Full text linkMigration has long constituted a foundational aspect in shaping societies. Migrants are driven by their pursuit of safety, in response to political instability, lack of socio-economic opportunities, or due to natural hazards. Although migrants aspire to start a new and better life, they are faced with a different reality. They are often faced with institutional and administrative constraints, systemic barriers, and forms of cultural exclusion. The transitional process of resettlement is often marked by marginalization and discrimination while migrants try to navigate belonging in a new host society. Canada’s Multiculturalism Act of 1988 encourages tolerance towards newcomers. Guelph, a city in Wellington County in Southern Ontario where the majority of the population is of English, Scottish and Irish ethnic origins, started hosting immigrants from non-traditional countries such as China, Afghanistan, and Former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s.This study draws on theories grounded in migration, transnationalism, and cultural identity. In this qualitative research, I examine the role of structural and symbolic barriers in restricting and hindering the integration of Arabic-speaking newcomers from Syrian and Iraq in Guelph. Findings presented in my research are derived from semi-structured interviews and suggest that while barriers may impact and challenge newcomers’ integration, they may not be the sole determining factor that shapes the integration process. Findings suggest that contributing factors such as the identity of the newcomer, the sense of belonging and individual agency play a crucial role in shaping their integration. I argue that recognizing the influence of the complex identities and agency of newcomers in their settlement processes allows for better community practices, service provision and policies aimed at serving newcomers
Instagram’s Role in Sustainable Travel Planning: An Information Adoption Model Analysis Across Generations
Full text linkSocial media has transformed how travelers plan their trips, particularly in the context of sustainable travel, which emphasizes minimizing environmental impacts and supporting local communities. This study examines the influence of social media on sustainable travel planning across four generational cohorts, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z, using the Information Adoption Model (IAM). Data were collected from Canadian adults aged 18 and older who use social media for travel planning through a structured online survey. Key constructs included source credibility, argument quality, perceived information usefulness, and information adoption. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to assess relationships among IAM constructs, while measurement invariance (MICOM) testing evaluated cross-generational comparability. Due to partial invariance, one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted to further examine generational differences