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Graduate Student Search Strategies within Academic Digital Libraries
No full textPurpose: When searching within an academic digital library, a variety of information seeking strategies may be employed. The purpose of this study is to determine whether graduate students choose appropriate information seeking strategies for the complexity of a given search scenario, and to explore among other factors that could influence their decisions. Methods: We used a survey method in which participants (n=176) were asked to recall their most recent instance of an academic digital library search session that matched two given scenarios (randomly chosen from four alternatives), and for each scenario identify whether they employed search strategies associated with four different information seeking models. Results: Among the search strategies, only lookup search was used in a manner that was consistent with the complexity of the search scenario. Other factors that influenced the choice of strategy were the discipline of study and the type of academic search training received. Patterns of search tool use with respect to the complexity of the search scenarios were also identified. Conclusion: These findings highlight that not only is it important to train graduate students on how to conduct academic digital library searches, more work is needed to train them on matching the information seeking strategies to the complexity of their search tasks and developing interfaces that guide their search process.}This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), through the Discovery Grant held by the first author (RGPIN-2017-06446).Facultyye
Exploring the work-related experiences of retail workers in Saskatchewan: A critical narrative study
No full textA Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education, University of Regina. xii, 233 p.The retail industry is predominant in providing goods and services to customers
worldwide. For example, studies have found that more than 10% of employees work in the retail
sector in Canada. However, frontline retail employees experience considerable challenges, such
as mistreatment and hostility from managers. Yet, research has generally failed to explore the
nature of those challenges or offer strategies to address them. Using a narrative inquiry/approach
methodology, the study explored the work-related experiences and conditions of four frontline
retail workers at a Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada store. The study drew on critical theory and
social justice theory as theoretical lenses to challenge the prevalence of neoliberal ideology at the
studied workplace and its influence on the work-related experiences of frontline workers at that
workplace.
The narrative inquiry building blocks of temporality, sociality, spatiality, and other
narrative approaches, as well as the theoretical framework, guided the presentation and
discussion of the study findings. The participants’ narratives revealed they experienced
neoliberal policies and practices that they thought constituted voicelessness, sexism,
individualism, racism, nepotism, underemployment, and cronyism at their retail store. The
integration of the participants’ data created informative narratives of their work-related
experiences and offered a way to improve their fragmented, scattered, and sometimes
contradictory narratives into coherent narratives. The narratives also revealed that some
participants perceived their workplace conditions as overwhelming, harsh, and alien. The
implications of the findings of the study for policy, practice, and theory development, as well as
suggestions for further research and recommendations arising from the study, are discussed.Studentye
Immortal tulips
No full textA Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts, University of Regina. vii, 46 p.“Immortal Tulips” is my graduation show at the Fifth Parallel Gallery. From November 6th to November 17th, 2023, I will exhibit the results of my Master of Fine Arts program. In this exhibition, I present five pieces, including “Blood Rain,” “As Gentle as Death,” “Bloody November – آبان خونین ” “One Step Forward,” and “Ayatollah’s Office.”
By presenting a variety of installations in this exhibition, using the three simple motifs of tulips, nooses, and threads, I create an atmosphere to immerse the audience in the emotions I feel regarding my country’s situation. I have felt desperation, agony, and sorrow because of the relentless rain of grief and bitter news of the regime's cruelty. The Islamic Republic regime committed horrific crimes and took thousands of lives of freedom fighters, along with taking the freedom and happiness of a great many of Iranians, including me. In the past, I defined my art as political activism or part of the resistance movement, but eventually, I realized that was not true because I am outside of Iran's border and only a far witness to what is happening to my homeland; so, my work has become more a reflection of my emotions about what is happening in my homeland.
My goal is to embody my different emotions, emotions such as admiration of courage, regret, loss, fear, suffocation, bitterness about an atmosphere of terror and insecurity, sorrow of bombardment of horrific events, and distress about an uncertain future. My method is to create a visual translation of these emotions through metaphors. I use Persian poetry as a bridge between abstract emotions and visual language, and I borrow the tulip from that poetry as my predominant motif.
All the elements of "Immortal Tulips" are metaphors for the current conditions of oppression and murder of people in Iran by the governing regime and its police and militia. The
colour red is an obvious reference to blood. The tulips stand in for the bodies of the dead, martyrs who have been killed because of their belief in freedom and resistance to the Regime. The overall darkness within the gallery represents political suffocation. Nooses represent systematic brutality, and the red threads are evocative of blood drops falling.
"Immortal Tulips" is my way of expressing sorrow and anger about the human rights violations inflicted on the Iranian protestors, including myself. I share this grief to build sympathy and understanding among Canadian audiences and try to be a voice for the courageous Iranian protestors who are risking their lives for liberty.
Annette Wieviorka, a French specialist in the Holocaust and the history of the Jewish people, acknowledges that political testimony can be transformed “into a work of art” if one experiences suffering inflicted by an oppressive regime. (Kia Lindroos, Frank Möller 2017, 36)1 As far as my personal experience goes, I was affected by general injustice and oppression during the 27 years I lived under the Islamic Republic regime. Now that I have left, I am a witness, and my art is a narration of my suffering in those years and of my witnessing how Iranian protestors are still suffering in Iran from brutality that is even worse than I experienced.Studentye
An intelligent system approach for predicting the risk of heart failure
No full textA Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Applied Science in Industrial Systems Engineering , University of Regina. xv, 178 p.Heart failure is a chronic, progressive condition in which the heart muscle is unable to pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs for blood and oxygen. It is a severe and long-term condition and there are several complications from heart failure that include irregular heartbeat, sudden cardiac arrest, heart valve problems, pulmonary hypertension, kidney damage, liver damage, malnutrition etc. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the number one cause of death in cardiovascular diseases (CVD) is estimated at 17.9 million a year, which accounts for 31% of all deaths worldwide. The majority of heart patients are diagnosed at a stage of high risk since the early screening and diagnosis of any heart disease is complicated and the particular medical exams are expensive. The current therapeutic approaches lose their effectiveness at this time, which can have deadly repercussions. To lower the mortality rate, novel methods for the early identification of cardiac disease are therefore vital.
The research aims to create intelligent systems that can help doctors identify heart disease more quickly and affordably. The likelihood of a patient's survival will rise with the early discovery of potential damage in the system of the heart. The thesis provides a Fuzzy Inference System approach and Feed Forward Back Propagation Neural Network approach to develop intelligent systems based on some input parameters. There are so many factors that can affect the system
of the heart. This research uses eleven major parameters to predict the risk of heart failure.
The primary outcome of this study is that modelling based on artificial intelligence approaches is far more successful than what is currently available in the medical field for the early detection of heart disease. The performance of the developed systems has been evaluated by a confusion matrix based on 221 datasets collected from a valid source. The obtained result demonstrates that the performance parameters of the FIS model provide superior results compared to the
ANN model. The developed FIS system's accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity are 90.50%, 90.91%, 90.50% and 90.31%, respectively. A Graphical User Interference (GUI) is developed using the MATLAB App designer tool to facilitate the system’s practical applicability for the end-users.Studentye
Integrated optimization of hybrid steam-solvent injection in post-CHOPS reservoirs with wormhole networks and foamy oil behaviour under uncertainty
No full textA Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Applied Science in Petroleum Systems Engineering, University of Regina. xiii, 134 p.As for the enormous heavy oil resources deposited in Western Canada, cold heavy oil
production with sand (CHOPS) has achieved a low recovery about 5-15% of the originaloil-
in-place (OOIP), though both its in-situ generated open channels (i.e., wormholes) and
induced foamy oil lead to a higher oil recovery than expected. Hybrid steam-solvent
injection has been considered as the most effective recovery method for heavy oil
reservoirs; however, the existence of wormhole networks makes it technically and
operationally challenging and foamy oil may be artificially induced. Physically, geological
uncertainty needs to be considered appropriately with respect to wormhole networks and
foamy oil flow since model-based optimization methods find their limits.
In this study, integrated techniques have been developed to optimize performance of the
hybrid steam-solvent injection processes in a depleted post-CHOPS reservoir with
consideration of wormhole networks and foamy oil flow. After a reservoir geological
model has been built and calibrated with the measured production profiles, its wormhole
network is inversely determined with the newly developed pressure-gradient-based (PGB)
sand failure criterion. Such a calibrated reservoir geological model is then used to optimize
the net present value (NPV) of a hybrid steam-solvent injection process by selecting
injection time, soaking time, production time, injection rate, steam temperature, and steam
quality as the controlling variables. A hybrid optimization technique based on the genetic
algorithm (GA) is then integrated with the orthogonal array (OA) and Tabu search (TS) to
maximize the objective function by rationalizing the injection and production parameters
and simultaneously retarding the displacement front to extend the reservoir life under
uncertainty. In a given CHOPS well, not only can the proposed method be used to
determine the overall morphology of the wormhole network, including intensity and
coverage, but also design, evaluate, and optimize performance of any potential enhanced
oil recovery (EOR) processes in a post-CHOPS reservoir within a unified, efficient, and
accurate framework.
In the optimized scenarios, the NPV of the optimized scenarios are significantly higher
than that of the unoptimized scenario (i.e., the Reference case). In particular, the NPV of
Scenario #3-2 (i.e., the hybrid GA-OA-TS optimization algorithm) is significantly higher
than that of the Reference case and is 56.01% higher than that of Scenario #3-1 (i.e., only
the GA optimization algorithm). The hybrid optimization algorithm can well balance the
relationship between recovery factor and operational costs to maximize the NPV within a
unified, consistent, and efficient framework.
Then, such a hybrid algorithm has been extended for a CHOPS reservoir containing either
dendritic (i.e., fractal) or regional wormhole under uncertainty with relatively accurate and
consistent results. The pressure distribution of the dendritic wormhole network is more
uniform, while the pressure drop range of the regional wormhole network is mainly
concentrated in a high permeability area around the wellbore. The pressure distribution of
the dendritic wormhole model is more realistic; however, its computational costs are much
higher due to the need for refining local grids.Studentye
Predictive visual servoing; uncertainty analysis and probabilistic robust frameworks
No full textA Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Industrial Systems Engineering, University of Regina. xx, 214 p.Motion control of robots in unstructured environments is a challenging task. The utilization of cameras as an information-rich sensor shows promise. In this context, image-based visual predictive controllers have gained attention due to their optimal-ity and constraint-handling capabilities. However, their performance deteriorates in presence of uncertainties in the robotic platforms, system models, and measurements. This work proposes a set of robust image-based visual predictive control methods that overcome the shortcomings of the previous visual servoing methods in the presence of uncertainties. In this dissertation, we have proposed a set of adaptive, stochastic, risk-averse, and learning-based visual servoing schemes that improve the performance and constraint compliance of visual servoing systems compared to their classical coun-terparts. The validity of the proposed control frameworks has been evaluated on a 6-DOF serial industrial manipulator and a model unmanned aerial vehicles via various experiments and simulations.Studentye
Understanding hadronic mass through light meson structure at the EIC
No full textA Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Physics, University of Regina. xv, 115 p.The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is a new US $2 billion high-luminosity accelerator that is
expected to be operational at BrookhavenNational Laboratory (BNL), USAat the beginning
of the next decade [1]. One of the main goals of the EIC is to understand the origin of
hadronic mass, this is the majority of visible mass (¡99%) in the universe. Based on
current understanding, it is known that the mass of these systems is intricately connected
to their internal structure. To understand this structure, and therefore these hadronic mass
generation mechanisms, one of the simplest ways to examine the lightest hadronic systems
such as mesons (composed of a quark and anti-quark pair). The main focus of this research
project is to study the light mesons (in particular kaon, ¸) through Deep Exclusive Meson
Production (DEMP) reactions. This work includes upgrading a bespoke Monte-Carlo event
generator, called DEMPgen [2], with a separate new module to investigate the feasibility
studies of the kaon electroproduction reactions at the EIC. It involves the selection of a
theoretical model to parameterize the various components of the cross-section over a wide
range of EIC kinematics, implementation of the parameterization into an event generator
with new techniques to calculate the total differential cross-section for the events, and
configuration of all modules together to look for any errors and bugs. It also entails assuring
improved computational efficiency, readability, and stability with reduced computational
time to enable greater statistics for future studies. All these modifications in DEMPgen are
required to conduct the feasibility studies of DEMP k⁺at the EIC.Studentye
Sword fighting in virtual reality: Where are we and how do we make it real
No full textA Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Computer Science, University of Regina. ix, 98 p.Virtual Reality has historically been a research space concerned with recreating the natural world around us. It is currently best known for its role in gaming and escapism. A number of different mediums have used virtual reality for its strengths in training. It is particularly useful for its ability to recreate real world locations and situations while still having full control over the environment. One area where it has failed in this realism is in its portrayal of fencing. Fencing, also known as sword fighting, is a common interaction in virtual reality gaming. Virtual reality fencing is plagued by a lack of features that are necessary to achieve realistic fencing. In this thesis I present eleven features gathered through observations of seven games. Weapon weight, parries, edge detection, edge alignment, point detection, weapon flex, blade tracking, response to physical locomotion, quality of expected movements, and weapon interaction with the environment are identified as necessary features in a realistic fencing experience. These features are explored with respect to their appearance in games as well as with regard to the current issues surrounding their implementation. It is found that all eleven features are necessary for the creation of a realistic fencing experience and they will require a physics based approach to their implementation and interactions.Studentye
Suicidal Ideation, Planning, and Attempts Among new Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cadets
No full textRoyal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report diverse occupational stressors and repeated exposures to potentially psychologically traumatic events, which may increase the odds of screening positive for a mental disorder, and increase the risk of death by suicide. The current study was designed to provide prevalence information regarding suicidal behaviours (i.e., ideation, planning, attempts) and assess for sociodemographic differences among cadets at the start of the RCMP Cadet Training Program (CTP)The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The RCMP Study is supported by the RCMP, the Government of Canada and the Ministry of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. L. Lix is supported by a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Methods for Electronic Health Data Quality. T. O. Afifi is supported by a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Childhood Adversity and Resilience. S. H. Stewart is supported by a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Addictions and Mental Health. The current article’s development, analyses and distribution was supported by a generous grant from the Medavie Foundation, Royal Canadian Mounted Police.Facultyye
koskon âtâyohkan: Healing the integration of intergenerational trauma and addictions
No full textA Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Public Policy, University of Regina. x, 211 p.This qualitative research delved into the recovery experiences from substance use disorder
among nine Indigenous participants with co-occurring intergenerational trauma (IGT).
Prompted by the health disparities Indigenous people face, particularly from the lingering
trauma of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system, the study aimed to understand the
intersection of IGT with addiction recovery. The absence of culturally congruent treatment
initiatives in current approaches necessitates this exploration. Utilizing the Nêhiýaw
Methodological Framework grounded in phenomenology, participants’ narratives were
summarized, unveiling their lived experiences of trauma and its intergenerational impacts.
The discovery of the recovery processes, termed “miskamowin,” is illustrated through three
pathways: pîkwêyihtamowin describes the anguish linked to intergenerational trauma and
addiction, koskon âtâyohkan is the shift towards Indigenous trauma care, and miyo
pimâtisiwin is the pursuit of a good life mindful of intergenerational cycles. Findings
highlighted the inadequacies of Western policy approaches and treatment models in
addressing the unique challenges Indigenous communities face. Participants favoured
Indigenous-centric solutions, underscoring the importance of culturally informed recovery
processes. As a response, the research proposes the “Ôskimacîtahowin: A New Beginning”
model—a holistic approach rooted in Indigenous wisdom, traditions, and ceremonies. This
model emphasizes the necessity of a policy shift towards Indigenous-led, community-based,
and spiritually anchored treatments, aiming to create a trauma-informed future for Indigenous
people in Canada.Studentye