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User Performance and Experience with varying GPS Accuracy for Location Finding in Agricultural Field Research
No full textAccurate location information in a mobile map application is imperative within specialized domains like agricultural field research where users often carry out location-finding tasks. This is particularly relevant in agricultural research where field plots are small and similar in visual appearance. Location inaccuracy can result in difficulties determining the exact location of a target plot, leading to increased time and manual effort for plot identification. While smartphone map applications are widely used for wayfinding, GPS accuracy may not be sufficient for location-finding tasks in agricultural contexts, especially when the error in location accuracy equals or exceeds the size of the target plot. There is little known about smartphone GPS reliability and user experience during these tasks, and how inaccuracy affects user performance and trust in location information for agricultural field research tasks. This thesis investigates the effects of GPS accuracy on the usability of a map application for finding locations in agricultural field research. Two empirical studies were conducted to evaluate smartphone GPS accuracy and the influence of error rates on user performance and trust in the system while performing location-finding tasks in an agricultural field research scenario. The results from these studies establish a direct correlation between high error rates and diminished performance, resulting in reduced trust in the provided location information. Additionally, the results highlight various strategies employed to mitigate the reduced accuracy. This new knowledge can improve user experience in location-based applications through the implementation of best practices to provide better user support
Development of a transmission model and evaluation of non-antimicrobial strategies against swine dysentery
No full textThe abstract of this item is unavailable due to an embargo
The Impact of COVID-19 on Canadian Acute Care Nursing Professionals: An Integrative Review
No full textBackground: The COVID-19 pandemic has put widespread pressures on the Canadian
healthcare system. As infections soared and the healthcare system attempted to grapple with
increased patient loads and acuity, nurses were impacted and, among other issues, began leaving
the profession. Shortfalls of acute care staff have caused bed closures, service disruptions, and
decreased access to timely patient care. In order to stem the tide of nurses exiting the profession,
the system needs to change. Understanding the complexity of pandemic impacts on nurses is
integral to making changes that will be most impactful as COVID-19 continues and as new
pandemics occur.
Purpose: To integrate the current evidence of COVID-19 impacts on Canadian acute care nurses.
Method: This is an integrative review using Whittemore and Knafl’s framework. The databases
searched were CINAHL, MEDLINE, Web of Science, and NIH. The search terms used were
Canada/Canadian/Canadians, the name of each province, nurse/nurses/nursing, and COVID 19/SARS-CoV-2/coronavirus/cov-19. Search criteria were supported by a health sciences
librarian. Twenty articles were found to meet inclusion criteria and contribute to an
understanding of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on acute care nurses specifically.
Results: The current evidence has been synthesized into a conceptual framework which indicates
the COVID-19 pandemic impacted acute care nurses in Canada through four main mechanisms:
a) changes which sometimes occurred rapidly and frequently; b) access to needed resources; c)
connections between nurses as well as others; and d) aspects of the infectious agent itself. The
outcomes of the pandemic on nurses included positive effects, physical effects, emotional
responses, leaving/attrition, and mental health disorders. As well, four significant mediating
factors were identified as coping, making connections, learning and experience, and finding
meaning.
Application to Nursing: Nurses have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that
are far-reaching and possibly long-term. Understanding how these impacts occur, can help in the
formation of policies and procedures that can mitigate the effects and support nurses even during
pandemic events
Design and Detection of Non-Coherent Unitary Constellations for SIMO Systems for Short Packet Communications
No full textUltra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) have been a crucial part of 5G and upcoming 6G networks to cater to mission-critical applications with stringent demands for high reliability and minimal latency. Short packet communications (SPC) have been employed to meet the requirement of low latency. Coherent communications require the transmission of pilot symbols to obtain accurate instantaneous channel state information (CSI), thus suffering from spectral efficiency (SE) loss in SPC. These challenges motivate the use of non-coherent communications, which do not require instantaneous CSI, as an alternative paradigm for coherent communications in SPC.
Among different schemes of non-coherent communications, unitary multi-symbol constellations and multi-level unitary multi-symbol constellations have been investigated to improve the error performance of communication systems. In the literature, there have been two approaches to design and detect unitary constellations and multi-level unitary constellations. The first one is the unstructured constellations with maximum-likelihood (ML) detection, which can achieve optimal error performance but suffer from high complexity in both design and detection. As a result, this approach is not practical for many practical applications. The other approach is the structured unitary constellations with simplified detectors, which can have low complexity in design and detection, therefore being practical. However, the structured constellations sacrifice the optimal error performance of the unstructured constellations. Hence, in this thesis, we focus on the structured unitary and multi-level unitary constellations with low complexity while improving the error performance to meet the reliability requirement of communication systems.
Firstly, we investigate the design of multi-level unitary constellations for block Rayleigh fading channels. By using the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the design criterion, we formulate a multiple-symbol constellation optimization problem, which turns out to have high computational complexity to construct and detect. We exploit the structure of the formulated problem and decouple the constellation into a Cartesian product of a unitary constellation design and a multi-level design. The proposed multi-level design has low complexity in both construction and detection and is compatible with any type of unitary constellation in the literature. Simulation results show that our multi-level design performs better than traditional pilot-based schemes and other existing low-complexity single-level designs in low SNR regimes.
Secondly, we propose a novel structure of unitary constellations for block Rayleigh fading channels. Our proposed structure involves a Cartesian product of an amplitude vector and a phase-shift keying (PSK) vector, which reduces the design complexity compared to the unstructured unitary constellations. Furthermore, the structure allows iterative detection of amplitude vectors and phase vectors, which reduces the complexity of the ML detector. We adopt the sort-decision-feedback-differential-detection (sort-DFDD) to further reduce the complexity of detecting the PSK vector when compared to the ML detector. Furthermore, we adopt a posterior probability as a reliability criterion to improve the error performance of sort-DFDD, which results in near-optimal error performance in the case of the PSK constellations with equal modulation order. This detector is called Posteriori-based-reliability-sort-DFDD (PR-sort-DFDD) and has polynomial complexity. We also propose an improved detector called improved-PR-sort-DFDD to detect a more generalized PSK structure, i.e.,PSK symbols with unequal modulation orders. This detector also approaches the optimal error performance with polynomial complexity. Through simulation, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed multi-symbol unitary constellation over competing low-complexity unitary constellations and traditional pilot-based schemes
Improving The Usability of Software Systems Using Group Discussions: A Case Study on Galaxy
Get PDFUsability problems in software systems cause performance degradation, user dissatisfaction and loss in terms of cost. There is a growing need for the software systems to become more accessible, retrievable and usable for the users. The usability test of a software is conducted by getting the opinions directly from the users and its goal is to identify problems, uncover opportunities and learn about target users' preferences. But accessing real users is very difficult for certain software systems. However, there are many popular user forums such as Stack Overflow, Quora, Stack Exchange, Eclipse Community Forum etc. and people from different domains of knowledge use these forums to ask about their problems and post their concerns. So exploring these forums should provide significant knowledge for getting information about a system's usability issues. Previous studies show that investigating these group discussion forums discovered several usability issues that the system was unaware of such as topic categorization, automatic tag prediction, identifying reproducible codes etc. However, there are many Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMSs) such as Galaxy, Taverna, Kepler, iPlant, VizSciFlow etc. and although these SWfMSs are emerging and important for data extensive research, no study has been done earlier to figure out the usability problems of these systems. Therefore, in this thesis, we take Galaxy, a well-known SWfMS, as our use case. We explore the user forum that Galaxy offers where users ask for help from experts and other Galaxy users. We search for the issues users are discussing in the forum and find out several usability problems in different categories. In our first study, we try to group the usability problems to easily identify them and galaxy community can be informed of the existing usability problems of the system. While exploring the posts, we find a significant percentage (up to 28\%) of them lack tags. If tags are found, they do not reflect the context of the posts properly. This leads to one of the major usability problems for the discussion forums as users will be unable to identify suitable posts without proper tags. Moreover, users will face difficulties to explore the answers in those untagged questions. So in our second study, we try to suggest tags based on the context and proposed a method for automatically suggesting tags. Again in our extensive investigation, we find lots of usability issues but among them, the problem of finding and searching for the appropriate workflows emerges as a great usability problem of the system. Users, especially novice users, ask for workflow design recommendations from the experts but because of the domain-specific nature of SWfMSs, it gets difficult for them to design or implement a workflow according to their new requirements. Any software system's usability is called into question if users face trouble specifying or carrying out certain tasks and are not given the necessary resources. Therefore, to increase the usability of Galaxy, in our third study, we introduce a NLP-based workflow recommendation system where anyone can write their queries using natural language. Our system can recommend the users with the most relevant workflows in return. We develop a tool on the Galaxy platform based on the idea of the proposed method. Lastly, we believe our study findings can guide the Galaxy community to improve and extend the services according to the users' requirements. We are confident that our proposed methods can be applied to any software system to improve the usability of the system by exploring the user forums
Strained Metallocenophanes: Potential Monomers for Metallopolymers
No full textThe abstract of this item is unavailable due to an embargo
Set-Stat-Map: Visualizing Spatial Data with Mixed Numeric and Categorical Attributes
Get PDFMulti-attribute datasets are common and appear in many important scenarios for data analytics. Such data can be complex and thus difficult to understand directly without using visualization techniques. Existing visualizations for multi-attribute datasets are often designed based on attribute types, i.e., whether the attributes are categorical or numerical. Parallel Coordinates and Parallel Sets are two well-known techniques to visualize numerical and categorical data, respectively. However, visualization for mixed data types appears to be challenging. A common strategy to visualize mixed data is to use multiple information-linked views, e.g., Parallel Coordinates are often augmented with maps to explore spatial data with numeric attributes. In this paper, we design visualizations for mixed data types, where the dataset may include numerical, categorical, and spatial attributes.
The proposed solution Set-Stat-Map is a harmonious combination of three interactive components: Parallel Sets (visualizes sets determined by the combination of categories or numeric ranges), statistics columns (visualizes numerical summaries of the sets), and a dataset-specified map view (geospatial map view for spatial information, heatmap for pairwise information, etc.). We also augment the Parallel Sets view in two main ways: First, we impose textures on top of colors, which are spread into the other views, to enhance users' capability of analyzing distributions of pairs of attribute combinations. Second, we limit the number of sets for each axis to a small number by merging some of them into one and limit the sizes of the merged sets to improve the rendering performance as well as to reduce users' cognitive loads.
We demonstrate the use of Set-Stat-Map using different types of datasets: a meteorological dataset (CFSR), an online vacation rental dataset (Airbnb), and a software developer community dataset (StackOverflow). We provide design guidelines based on the results of the analysis of the performance from both visual analytics and scalability aspects. To examine the usability of the system, we collaborated with meteorologists, which reveals both challenges and opportunities for Set-Stat-Map to be used for real-life visual analytics
Utilization of mildly fractionated pea proteins for the development of thermally stable beverage emulsions
Get PDFMild fractionation is a non-invasive protein extraction technique that can be used to retain protein fractions of high purity and functionality. The overall aim of this research was to develop beverage emulsions using mild-fractionated soluble pea proteins with improved stability against thermal processing initially, soluble pea proteins were retained from a pea protein concentrate dispersion via mild fractionation using simple aqueous centrifugation. Later, high-pressure homogenized (20,000 psi for 6 cycles) 5 wt% oil-in-water emulsions were made using different concentrations of soluble proteins as the aqueous phase. After various emulsion characterization tests were carried out, 2.5 wt% of protein in the aqueous phase was concluded to be the ideal concentration of protein for optimum emulsion stability. All the emulsions for further characterization were made using 2.5 wt% of mildly fractionated soluble proteins in the aqueous phase. It was important to test the stability of pea protein-stabilized emulsions against various environmental stresses: heat treatment at 90°C for 30 minutes, addition of 0.1M-1M salt, and the effect of two different pH (2 and 7). Heating caused extensive emulsion destabilization due to droplet and protein aggregation at both the pH values. The emulsions at pH 2 showed destabilization even without heating. The problem of aggregation could be due to the denaturation of proteins during heat-treatment which caused the exposure of hydrophobic groups, in turn causing emulsion destabilization. To overcome the problem, it was hypothesized that partial denaturation of the soluble proteins by pre-heating and thereafter making the emulsions with the heated protein solutions could solve the problem of protein aggregation in emulsions after heat treatment. Therefore, emulsions were prepared at heated conditions using heat-treated (75°C) partially denatured soluble pea proteins. From the characterization tests, it was found that the heat-treated protein-stabilized emulsions at pH 7 had superior stability at all salt concentrations without any sign of extensive droplet and protein aggregation even after heating the emulsion to 90°C for 30 minutes. A similar improvement in stability was, however, not observed for the pH 2 emulsions prepared under comparable conditions. The effect of protein pre-heat treatment on the emulsion lipid digestibility was also determined by in-vitro digestion tests, which showed that the unheated protein unheated emulsion showed the maximum lipid digestion of 97.51%, followed by 73.47% and 56.06% lipid digestibility for heat-treated protein heated emulsion and heat-treated protein unheated emulsion, respectively. Overall, this research showed that the pre-treatment of mildly fractionated soluble proteins could significantly improve the stability of beverage emulsions and also influence the protein structure to reduce the lipid digestibility of the emulsions
CYANOBACTERIA PRESENCE IN BOREAL-TEMPERATE LAKES IN RESPONSE TO THE ANTHROPOCENE
No full textThe abstract of this item is unavailable due to an embargo
Structural and Environmental Variables Affecting Biodiversity Conservation in Agroforestry Systems in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon
Get PDFThe Northern Ecuadorian Amazon (NEA) is recognized as biodiversity hotspot that contains unique endemic plant species. However, unsustainable agricultural practices, such as more frequent cycles of shifting agriculture (SA), threat the NEA’s forests endurance with negative consequences for biodiversity levels and ecological functions. In this study, I examined the spatial and temporal dynamics of the diversity of native trees across various types of agroforestry systems (AFS) subjected to SA. That is, the degree of existing risk of endangerment of tree species, the rapid change in floristic composition of mature forests converted to AFS, and the recovery pace of forest communities following abandonment. Transforming mature forest communities (MFC) to different AFS leads to a decrease in alpha diversity up to 75%. AFSs preserve 56% of the beta diversity compared to MFC; at least 8% of the species are threatened and the demographic status of 92% species is unknown. MFCs seem to regain their original structure after AFS abandonment. In the second part, I investigated whether AFS reverses the effect of intensified SA in cocoa (Theobroma cacao) agrosystems. I addressed the extent to which multispecific cocoa AFSs buffer the impact of reduced fallows in SA on loss of species. Tree diversity showed a gradual decrease from low to intermediate to high intensification SA in cocoa AFS, with values of 46, 29, and 12 species richness. The absence of fallows in SA affects tree presence, leading to changes in floristic composition in 30% fewer species compared to the beta diversity in cocoa AFSs experiencing long resting phases. Nonetheless, the similar beta diversity between low and intermediate intensification levels of SA suggests a concomitant delay in forest degradation rates. Finally, I examined the extent to which beta diversity in AFS reverses the effect of shorter SA fallow periods in the soil properties of cocoa (T. cacao) agrosystems. Agroforestry systems, combined with SA, shields the negative outcome of intense land-use on the soil’s nutrients. The arboreal cover maintains the soil fertility needed for crop performance and food sustainability. The dominance of certain tree species (Vochysia leguiana, Inga edulis, Cordia alliodora) is essential to support adequate dynamic levels of nutrient cycling with more intense fallow periods, whereas some other species (Virola flexuosa, Chrysophyllum amazonicum, Ocotea bofo) have an apparent effect on soil acidity. I conclude that AFS have the potential for enhancing sustainable forest management and preservation of endangered tree species