19614 research outputs found
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Resonant Relationality: Sonic Explorations of a Berlin Holocaust Memorial
Full text linkThis thesis examines how engaging with sound at Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (MMJE) can be used to broaden discourses of Holocaust commemoration. Situated in central Berlin, the MMJE is a massive public memorial that is approximately 19,000 square meters in size and consists of 2711 rectangular concrete stelae with space to walk in between. Opening in 2005, it has become a well-known site of contemporary Holocaust memory, as it is regularly visited by tourists from all around the world.
For this project, I spent 17 days in Berlin conducting fieldwork, recording sounds at various locations and times in the memorial. I also worked with 5 research participants, each of whom shared their own reflections and/or audio recordings displaying the different ways in which they relate to the sounds they encountered at the memorial. They were asked to walk around the space, actively listen and identify the sounds they heard, and share their thoughts on the experience. Each participant was invited to upload their contribution to a website (www.mmjesounds.org) where all of their work can be appreciated.
This project demonstrates that much of the current discourse surrounding Holocaust commemoration is lacking in how the modality of sound is engaged with at existing sites of Holocaust memory. Using sonic and musical metaphors as well as soundscape compositions, this thesis explores various ways in which Steven Feld’s acoustemology, or knowing through sound, can be used to broaden these discourses. At a time where there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors to tell their stories, expanding our understanding of how public Holocaust memorialization is related to and engaged with is more crucial than ever before.Graduat
ZTCloudGuard: Zero trust context-aware access management framework to avoid medical errors in the era of generative AI and cloud-based health information ecosystems
No full textManaging access between large numbers of distributed medical devices has become a crucial aspect of modern healthcare systems, enabling the establishment of smart hospitals and telehealth infrastructure. However, as telehealth technology continues to evolve and Internet of Things (IoT) devices become more widely used, they are also increasingly exposed to various types of vulnerabilities and medical errors. In healthcare information systems, about 90% of vulnerabilities emerge from medical error and human error. As a result, there is a need for additional research and development of security tools to prevent such attacks. This article proposes a zero-trust-based context-aware framework for managing access to the main components of the cloud ecosystem, including users, devices, and output data. The main goal and benefit of the proposed framework is to build a scoring system to prevent or alleviate medical errors while using distributed medical devices in cloud-based healthcare information systems. The framework has two main scoring criteria to maintain the chain of trust. First, it proposes a critical trust score based on cloud-native microservices for authentication, encryption, logging, and authorizations. Second, a bond trust scoring system is created to assess the real-time semantic and syntactic analysis of attributes stored in a healthcare information system. The analysis is based on a pre-trained machine learning model that generates the semantic and syntactic scores. The framework also takes into account regulatory compliance and user consent in the creation of the scoring system. The advantage of this method is that it applies to any language and adapts to all attributes, as it relies on a language model, not just a set of predefined and limited attributes. The results show a high 1 score of 93.5%, which proves that it is valid for detecting medical errors.This research was supported by a grant from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) through the Collaborative Research and Development Initiative.FacultyReviewe
四種唔同死法: The four phases of death in Victoria's Chinatown
Full text linkVictoria’s Chinatown was once a lived-in ethnic community, whose residents faced discriminatory practices that led them to establish and develop a unique, subcultural physical space. Chinatowns are physical manifestations of racialized discrimination, and their existence therefore is in itself evidence of said discrimination. As time has gone on, Chinatown has transitioned away from being a lived space to being a symbolic one. My research seeks to explore that transition by reframing it through four stages of death that represent the multitude of states that Chinatown has embodied. I seek to examine how culture is upheld in the face of changes in both physical space and populous, as well as the importance of continued collective memory for the Chinese Canadians who have interacted with this space.Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards (JCURA)UndergraduateReviewe
Crafting geographies: Digital placemaking in the craft chocolate industry
Full text linkChocolate presents a challenge to North American consumers interested in ethical consumption as its main ingredient, cacao, can only be grown in equatorial regions that are generally distant from the food’s major consumer markets. While many consumers are unaware of chocolate’s supply chain, the commodity chocolate industry has been increasingly criticized for perpetuating environmental degradation alongside social and economic inequities for smallholder cacao farmers whose labour is foundational to the product’s creation. Positioning itself in opposition to commodity chocolate, the craft chocolate sector can be understood as a ‘moral market’ that presents a supply chain which aims to reduce the injustices commonplace in the chocolate industry. As a part of their alternative sourcing practices, companies within the craft chocolate sector procure cacao from a diverse selection of ‘origins’, or the geographic regions where cacao beans are harvested from the Theobroma cacao tree. Many craft chocolate companies are dedicated to educating consumers about the geographic features, harvesting processes, and land stewardship of cacao origins, all of which impact chocolate flavour. Critically, the contemporary ubiquity of online shopping has shifted much of this education to digital spaces. Company websites consequently represent a significant opportunity for North American consumers to learn about craft chocolate and cacao origins. However, there is a dearth of research into the efficacy of this consumer education and how consumers conceptualize cacao origins based on representations provided by commerce-oriented websites. Using an iterative, mixed-method process, this thesis draws on a novel dataset of 257 direct-to-consumer (DTC) craft chocolate websites operating in North America and 6 focus groups with 34 North American craft chocolate consumers to explore how cacao origin geographies are understood by consumers in commerce-driven digital contexts. Findings suggest that despite the purchase orientation of most websites keeping value chain information relatively superficial, the content provided is important to consumer assessment of a craft chocolate company’s legitimacy. This thesis contributes to the nascent concept of digital placemaking by providing a case study on how cacao origins are constructed through user interactions with DTC craft chocolate websites. Additionally, this thesis benefits the craft chocolate community by engaging in collaborative, practice-based research design with The Chocolate Project: Canada’s largest craft chocolate retailer and educator. Specifically, this research provides insights into broader industry trends and consumer habits that are often inaccessible to the smaller companies who comprise most of this market sector. Additionally, this thesis critiques the effectiveness and impacts of current communication practices on DTC craft chocolate websites and suggests alternative directions that may further support equitable value chains and reduce barriers to entry into craft chocolate.Graduat
Understanding Nursing Practice in the Age of the Electronic Health Record
No full textElectronic health records (EHR) have been increasingly implemented in Canadian hospitals. Often, EHRs are optimistically presented as a solution to optimize safe patient care through improved access to information and streamlined documentation. However, in practice, the implementation and use of EHRs is not without skepticism. To understand how EHRs are influencing hospital nursing practice, a systematic literature review of published time-motion and ethnographic studies focused on EHR use in acute care nursing practice was conducted. Drawing on a conception of nurses' work as involving a significant component of indirect patient care, or management of patient care trajectories (Allen, 2014), we synthesized key research findings from selected studies. These findings challenge common misconceptions about the EHR and elucidate how nursing practice is transformed.Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards (JCURA)UndergraduateReviewe
Validating Landsat Analysis Ready Data for nearshore sea surface temperature monitoring in the Northeast Pacific
No full textIn the face of global ocean warming, monitoring essential climate variables from space is necessary for understanding regional trends in ocean dynamics and their subsequent impacts on ecosystem health. Analysis Ready Data (ARD), being preprocessed satellite-derived products such as Sea Surface Temperature (SST), allow for easy synoptic analysis of temperature conditions given the consideration of regional biases within a dynamic range. This is especially true for SST retrieval in thermally complex coastal zones. In this study, we assessed the accuracy of 30 m resolution Landsat ARD Surface Temperature products to measure nearshore SST, derived from Landsat 8 TIRS, Landsat 7 ETM+, and Landsat 5 TM thermal bands over a 37-year period (1984–2021). We used in situ lighthouse and buoy matchup data provided by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO). Excellent agreement (R2 of 0.94) was found between Landsat and spring/summer in situ SST at the farshore buoy site (>10 km from the coast), with a Landsat mean bias (root mean square error) of 0.12 °C (0.95 °C) and a general pattern of SST underestimation by Landsat 5 of ?0.28 °C (0.96 °C) and overestimation by Landsat 8 of 0.65 °C (0.98 °C). Spring/summer nearshore matchups revealed the best Landsat mean bias (root mean square error) of ?0.57 °C (1.75 °C) at 90–180 m from the coast for ocean temperatures between 5 °C and 25 °C. Overall, the nearshore image sampling distance recommended in this manuscript seeks to capture true SST as close as possible to the coastal margin—and the critical habitats of interest—while minimizing the impacts of pixel mixing and adjacent land emissivity on satellite-derived SST.Funds were available from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Alliance grant awarded to MC (Ref. number: ALLRP 566735-21).FacultyReviewe
Abortion as a muted reality in Uganda: Narratives of adolescent girls' agentive experiences with pregnancy termination
Full text linkPregnancy termination, also referred to as abortion, is a contentious subject in many countries. Uganda's culture requires young people to remain celibatethey therefore suffer from restricted access to any sexual and reproductive health information, products, and services, including contraceptives. Girls who are pregnant in Uganda are oppressed in various ways, including being expelled from school. Since abortion is illegal under Ugandan law, those abortions that take place are assumed to have a high risk of being unsafe. Most previous studies in the African context have thus focused on the phenomenon of unsafe abortion. Adolescent abortion is characterized by a rhetoric of pathology that frames girls as victims of deadly unsafe abortion practices. This paper aims to critique the view that pregnant adolescent girls are merely vulnerable victims who passively accept the denial of SRH services, including abortion. We analyzed the life histories of 14 girls in Uganda who had undergone pregnancy termination. Our findings showed that adolescent girls are not passive victims of the structural barriers to abortion. They use their agency to obtain knowledge, make decisions, successfully terminate pregnancy, and conceal the information as needed. It is therefore important for policymakers to acknowledge the agency of adolescent girls in regard to pregnancy termination and how this recognition could be of benefit in terms of devising appropriate supports for them.This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant number 890-2020-0017.FacultyReviewe
Meta-optimization in safe reinforcement learning: Enhancing safety at training and deployment with fewer hyperparameters
Full text linkReinforcement learning (RL) is a trial-and-error framework for enabling intelligent systems to learn the optimal behaviour based on the feedback from the environment. In recent years, successful application of RL in controlling various embodied systems have been observed. However, the real-world deployment and training of RL methods require paying attention to certain limitations imposed by the robot and its surroundings. To address these limitations, safe RL algorithms aim to define safety constraints based on the physics of the system and modify the training regime of the RL methods to satisfy them during training and inference. While safe RL offers a promising direction for achieving real-world deployability, challenges such as sample efficiency and hyperparameter tuning hinders its applicability in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, this thesis proposes various approaches. First, a metagradient-based training pipeline called Meta Soft Actor-Critic Lagrangian (Meta SAC-Lag) is proposed which aims to optimize the aforementioned safety-related hyperparameters under the conventional Lagrangian framework. To study the performance, the proposed method is evaluated in various safety-critical simulated environments. In addition, a real-world task is designed, and the algorithm is successfully deployed on a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm to showcase its real-world deployability with minimal hyperparameter tuning requirements. Furthermore, a multi-objective policy optimization framework is proposed which specifies the trade-off between optimality and safety directly and optimizes both of them simultaneously. The competitive performance of the proposed algorithm compared to the state-of-the-art safe RL methods with fewer hyperparameters showcases its potential in providing a powerful alternative framework for safe RL.Graduat
Corrosive comparisons and the memory politics of “saming”: Threat and opportunity in the age of apology
No full textThis article contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of memory and historical justice studies by analyzing one, particularly troublesome kind of competitive comparison that sometimes happens in memory politics in the so-called age of apology. The article calls this kind of competitive comparison, “saming”. Saming involves the attempt, via far-fetched or otherwise wrongheaded comparison, to exploit the recognition of some well-known case of historical injustice. Further, saming involves pursuing this comparison in ways that both trivialize the original injustice and undermine the framework from which the recognition of that injustice derives. The article develops its arguments and analysis by studying Budapest’s House of Terror museum and two Canadian redress campaigns, which sought historical recognition for the wartime internments of persons of Italian and Ukrainian ancestry, respectively. Saming is a recurrent problem, ubiquitous and probably inevitable in memory politics because the recognition of historical injustice brings with it unavoidable and indeed often valuable incentives to comparison. Thus, the overall aim of this article is to analyze the threat of saming in order to better defend the cause of comparison in introspective collective remembrance.This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant number 895-2022-1000.FacultyReviewe
Exploring the Transition to a Community Health Centre Model of Primary Care: A Case Study on the Experiences of Physicians in the Kootenay Boundary
No full textTimely access to primary health care services is reflective of an effective health care system, yet many people in British Columbia (B.C.) lack access to a family physician. At a time when people are living longer and there is growing recognition of the need to address the social determinants of health, patient needs are becoming increasingly complex and requiring the support of multidisciplinary teams. This situation is leading communities to explore alternative ways of organizing primary health care to meet the diverse needs of both patients and providers. The success of primary care reform to date has been impacted by both a shortage of family physicians and the barriers inherent in practicing as teams within a physician-owned clinic supported by a Fee-For-Service (FFS) compensation model. In the Kootenay Boundary region of B.C., the development of a network of Community Health Centers (CHCs) is being explored to address the issues referenced above. This vision involves transitioning existing physician-
owned primary care clinics into a not-for-profit model. As such, the purpose of this research project is to better understand the enablers and barriers for transitioning primary care models based on the experience of physicians, Kootenay Boundary Division of Family Practice (KBDoFP) staff, and community members.Graduat