19614 research outputs found
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Religion and spirituality are not something we have (or do not have), they are something we do
No full textOur commonsense ways of recognizing and talking about ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ are problematic. Looking at phenomena as varied as rock music, meditation, and the asylum process, I argue that religion and spirituality are not something institutions or individuals possess but are rather constantly co-created and recreated in human interaction. In this lecture, I reflect on the ways our conventional understandings of ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ sometimes hinder rather than help us understand the world.Unreviewe
On bilevel programs and minimax problems
No full textSecond-order optimality conditions usually offer more precise insights into local optimality compared to their first-order counterparts. Concurrently, there has been a growing prevalence of bilevel programs and minimax problems in recent years. In our research, we intricately explore second-order optimality conditions within the realm of bilevel programs and minimax problems.
First, we provide a comprehensive exploration of second-order combined approaches for bilevel problems. Building on the well-known first-order combined approach, the research introduces novel techniques that incorporate lower-level second-order information to overcome the difficulty of the constraint qualification for bilevel problems. By characterizing lower-level optimal solutions using both first and second-order necessary optimality conditions, together with the value function constraint, we give some new single-level reformulations for bilevel problems for which the important partial calmness condition can be more likely to hold.
We then focus on the introduction and analysis of calm local minimax points, which is an appropriate local notion for nonconvex-nonconcave nonsmooth minimax problems. We study the properties of calm local minimax points, establishing their strong connections with existing optimality concepts. We provide a comprehensive exploration of first-order and second-order sufficient and necessary optimality conditions for calm local minimax points.Graduat
Animals as Property, Quasi-Property or Quasi-Person
No full textThe field of animal law has been structured for the last twenty-five years around two key paradigms: (i) property v. persons and (ii) rights v. welfare. In this talk, Professor Fernández explains why both of these binaries are unhelpful traps for the field and why she thinks we need to move towards a more flexible legal status for nonhuman animals, which she terms quasi-property/quasi-personhood. In the quasi-hood approach to the legal status of nonhuman animals, nonhuman animals are more than mere property but they are also persons of a sort, legal persons, because they have legal rights, and only legal persons have legal rights.UVic Graduate Student Law & Society Research GroupFacultyUnreviewe
Variability in free versus cued recall
Get PDFTwo tasks that have been used extensively to study memory are free recall (FR; study a list of words and later attempt to recall as many as possible) and cued recall tasks (CR; study a list of randomly or meaningfully paired cue and target words and later attempt to recall targets given cues). A long tradition of fruitful research using these tasks has resulted in a host of effects that offer insight into human memory. Here we describe one such novel effect and its potential implications for theories of memory. The effect in question–which we refer to as the ‘CR:FR variability effect’–is a surprising difference in inter-individual variability in performance between the two memory tasks. Specifically, in an initial experiment we observed greater individual differences in CR accuracy than in FR accuracy among individuals who performed both tasks. This result ran counter to our intuitions about the two memory tasks (e.g., one might expect that the lack of explicit retrieval structure in FR versus CR leaves more room for individual differences), and did not seem to be accounted for by popular formal models of memory (e.g., the Search of Associative Memory model; Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981). The vast majority of research using these tasks has focused exclusively on differences in measures of central tendency, and we found no published research comparing individual differences in free and cued recall. Our research project investigated the CR:FR variability effect and potential explanations for the effect via systematic and incremental manipulations to our stimuli and experimental designs. Specifically, across seven experiments we tested and replicated the effect using a general pool of ‘average’ English nouns (Experiment 1; N = 120 undergraduates), with a forced-recall procedure (Experiments 2A & 2B; N = 117 Prolific participants, N = 120 undergraduates), with meaningfully-related word pairs (Experiment 3; N = 260 Prolific participants), equating the study phases (Experiment 4; N = 360 Prolific participants), allowing participants self-paced study (Experiment 5; N = 120 undergraduates), and implementing serial recall for CR (Experiment 6; N = 211 undergraduates). Having ruled out primarily methodological explanations, we conducted a final experiment in which participants were instructed to use an imagery-based memory strategy previously shown to be effective (Thomas et al., 2023), with a pool of words conducive to imagery (Madan et al., 2010). In this experiment (Experiment 7; N = 208 Prolific participants), we did not observe the variability effect. We argue that individual differences in strategy use–due partly to task constraints in FR and CR, and partly to differential individual variability within different strategies–explain the CR:FR variability effect. We consider the implications of these findings for theories of memory and future memory research.Graduat
New palladium catalyst: A mechanistic study
No full textMy research revolved around a mechanistic study of a newly developed palladium catalyst precursor. Palladium cross-coupling reactions are largely used in pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries and new precursors are developed to be stable in storage, have high TONs, low catalyst loading and, ideally, yield monoligated species (which are highly reactive due to their coordinatively unsaturated nature). The better the catalyst, the more affordable the products (such as medicine). Utilizing mass spectrometry, I investigated the catalyst activation and the first step in the catalytic cycle (oxidative addition) of the new palladium precursor. This involved studying the reaction mechanisms by which it activates, how it behaves, what intermediates form and whether it forms the desirable monoligated species. Due to the catalyst’s air-sensitive nature, I employed special techniques to keep everything as oxygen-free as possible. This includes the use of a glovebox (nitrogen-filled chamber), Schlenk lines and oxygen purging techniques. Results show that the precursor activates rapidly under mild reaction conditions with very low catalyst loading, yielding the desirable monoligated species via associative ligand exchange. The oxidative addition complex is also monoligated and separable from solution.Valerie Kuehne Undergraduate Research Awards (VKURA)UndergraduateReviewe
Skyward AI: Advancing Astronomy with Intelligent Machines
No full textThis dissertation represents the work I did in integrating advanced machine learning techniques into three important challenges that the field of astronomy currently faces.
Firstly, I tackled the emerging concern of contamination from low earth orbit satellites in the upcoming massive spectroscopic sky surveys. With the imminent launch of several hundred thousand satellites, there’s a potential for significant contamination in wide field, multi-fiber spectrographs. I employed a multi-staged approach to gauge the feasibility and constraints of pinpointing and reducing the impact of such contamination in a WEAVE-like stellar spectral survey. By crafting a series of convolutional-network based architectures, I managed to identify and separate stellar spectra that were artificially tainted with satellite (solar-like) spectra. My findings revealed a promising capability to flag a majority of contaminated sources and reconstruct the clean spectra with minimal error. This work offers a suite of machine learning strategies that can be harnessed to enhance stellar parameters for contaminated spectra in the WEAVE stellar spectroscopic survey and similar endeavours.
In my second project, I introduced a novel solution to the well-studied problem of atmospheric turbulence compromising the clarity of astronomical images. By training a U-Net on simulated observations, I demonstrated how a sequence of short-exposure observations of a stellar field can be transformed into a turbulence- and noise-free image. This approach significantly boosts angular resolution over arbitrarily wide fields while preserving flux to a lower signal-to-noise than an averaged stack, without compromising the astrometric stability in the resultant image. It is technically simple as well, keeping costs of implementing and maintaining such a system low.
Lastly, I explored the potential of self-supervised learning in extracting meaningful representations of galaxies from millions of unlabelled sources. Recognizing the power of self-supervised methods, particularly SimCLR, I aimed to validate their utility for the UNIONS Survey. My efforts were geared towards automating the clustering and classification of galaxy types, refining photometric redshift estimations, and leveraging these techniques to unearth rare astronomical phenomena such as ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, gravitational lenses, and merging galaxies. The initial results show that, by using a query galaxy image, the fully trained SimCLR model can successfully find similar types of galaxies using a self-similarity search in a database of millions of galaxies.
Throughout these projects, I have combined machine learning and astronomical research, presenting innovative solutions to pressing challenges in the field. Each endeavour reflects my dedication to leveraging the capabilities of machine learning to propel astronomical discoveries forward, offering fresh perspectives and tools to address longstanding and emerging issues in the discipline.Graduat
Ecologizing the Chinese Countryside: The Rural Fix for Urban Sustainability in the Lower Yangzi Delta
No full textThis dissertation examines the phenomenon of ecologization, the proliferating construction of ecological spaces (eco-spaces), which have emerged in densely populated rural areas of the lower Yangzi Delta mega-urban region in response to the sustainable development agenda and Chinese policies of ecological civilization. Drawn from the Chinese word shengtaihua (生态化), ecologization is used in this study to conceptualize the various ways ecology is interpreted and implemented in the Chinese context, as it challenges established discourses, practices and roles of spatial design disciplines which seek to address the goals of sustainable development and the ideologies of ecological civilization. The analysis of ecologization also provides a design perspective in understanding rural and urban transformation under strong environmental and cultural governance in China. Based on the interplay between environmental protection and urbanization, the process of ecologization is essentially a form of urbanization, modernization and civilization that radically transforms the spatial and social fabric of rural landscapes in the lower Yangzi Delta. As a national prototype for green and ecologically integrated development, ecologization in the lower Yangzi Delta may soon be widely adopted in the entire country, causing great loss of cultural landscapes, social sustainability and rurality in the Chinese countryside.
Through extensive fieldwork, semi-structured interviews and document analysis, the dissertation illustrates how the interpretation of national environmental and ideological mandates among local planning elites in China has resulted in particular processes and patterns around the development and construction of eco-spaces. Detailed analysis of the ways spatial design disciplines interpret, implement, and govern eco-spaces highlight how ecologization across rural areas of the lower Yangzi Delta has become the fix for challenges of urban sustainability.
A key finding of the research is that to fix urban sustainability statistically and aesthetically, two strategies—eco-metrics and eco-culture aesthetics —were devised by local planning elites to implement environmental and ideological tasks. Eco-metrics were achieved as top-down administrative tasks irrespective of spatial conditions, while eco-culture aesthetics composed new narratives of the rural landscapes as a continuation of culture and tradition. The evidence illustrates how ecologization is detrimental to social and environmental sustainability in rural areas. In the process, genuine social sustainability and pre-existing spatial conditions were largely disregarded, and village rationality, which maintains rurality and rural sustainability in the context of a globalized economy and rural urbanization, was lost. This outcome is inconsistent with the stated goals and rhetoric of indicator-based measurement methods of sustainable development and ecological civilization.
Another key finding highlights strong cultural assertions in ecologization deliberately intended to reinforce the Party’s ideological influence, to ensure collective social value towards ecological civilization, and to harmonize conflicts between rural and urban, and local interests and national policies. Moreover, ecologization in the lower Yangzi Delta deployed spatial design disciplines as a tool to legitimize implementation of both environmental and ideological goals in eco-spaces and the surrounding countryside. Such forward-looking outcome-based approaches and the near total disregard of authentic local historical, social and cultural processes, is part of a spatial design approach that is consistent with the Party-state’s intention to wholly restructure spatial and social forms.
The dissertation concludes by arguing that in-depth research and consideration of historical, contextual, and social processes must be undertaken to ensure spatial design disciplines can make meaningful contributions to genuine sustainability. Such sustainable planning and design should also be integrated into policy-making processes and be independent from administrative hierarchy and local power dynamics. The strategies and implications of ecologization in other parts of China, or in other cultural and political contexts could be further examined in comparative research.Graduat
Understanding weight stigma among diverse people in Canada
No full textWeight stigma refers to the negative attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes directed at individuals with higher body weight. In Canada, weight stigma is prevalent across various social contexts, including healthcare, education, and interpersonal relationships. To better understand how Canadians experience weight stigma alongside different marginalized identities, we invited participants who have experienced weight-based prejudice to complete a brief qualitative online survey. Individuals were asked to share their lived experiences and provide one specific example of when they faced weight-based prejudice. The data collected will be analyzed using thematic analysis to identify overarching patterns and themes across the experiences of many individuals.Valerie Kuehne Undergraduate Research Awards (VKURA)UndergraduateReviewe