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Who watches the watchmen? Assessing potential regulatory capture through an examination of historical Surface Transportation Board (STB) decisions on shipper/railroad disputes
Get PDFThis thesis will examine a series of historical decisions made by a major U.S. regulatory body, the Surface Transportation Board (STB) in the surface freight transportation sector. As a federal regulator overseeing a major industry, the STB (and the ICC before it) were created to operate as a neutral economic regulator acting in the public interest, managing relationships and disputes between surface railroads (in this case, railroads) and their shipper customers. But understanding the incentives and consequences described by Stigler (1971) in the context of economic regulation and capture, in particular the U.S. freight rail sector continues to operate under some controversy because of the questionable regulatory objectivity of the STB as the railroad regulator (Gallamore, 2014). Much of the prior regulatory research about the STB has focused on its scope along with key issues resulting from the agency’s long term regulation of the rail sector (Goldman, 2022), as well as the impact of regulation on the operation and management of the U.S. freight rail system. Other related literature tries to gain insight on decision processes as well as rationalizing the outcomes of the STB decisions over various freight disputes (Warren, 2018). But in spite of this body of research, to our knowledge there have been few if any analytic attempts to assess the fairness or objectivity of the STB regulatory decisionmaking. One interesting feature of the STB crucial to our assessment is that the agency maintains an online compendium or database of its decisions, going back well into the 1990’s and overall numbering into the thousands. As a qualitative database it can be difficult to use for analytics, but it is detailed and allows us to set up both empirical and qualitative assessments of regulatory objectivity. A further underlying factor in formulating this thesis was the effort required to identify and code the sub-set of relevant STB decisions that were both thematically consistent (i.e. rate disputes between a railway and a shipper) as well as independent over time to the present. This extensive vetting yielded individual decisions/data points that were used to conduct our initial statistical analysis and subsequent qualitative work.
After reviewing related literature on assessments of regulatory objectivity in other industries, the empirical part of the thesis estimates various statistical tests (randomness tests, tests of distributional differences) on the case decision data to identify whether or not the data were generated by a neutral decision-maker. To supplement the statistical analysis and to help facilitate understanding of the reasonability and justifiability of STB decisions, we further qualitatively analyze the same cases to add insight on regulatory behavior. Overall, we hope this study will contribute to a better understanding about the decision-making process of a major U.S. economic regulator. Further, we hope this work might help improve STB performance by improving future objectivity in regulatory decision-making within the US freight rail sector
THE SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL BENEFITS AND BARRIERS OF TRADITIONAL KARATE PARTICIPATION FOR CHILDREN FROM LOW-INCOME SETTINGS
Get PDFChildren from low-income settings have higher rates of mental health challenges than other children. In part, these challenges can be mitigated through sport participation; however, children from low-income settings have low rates of sport participation. Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory methodology informed development and completion of this research with integration of a Patient-oriented Research approach. Along with the academic advisory committee, research team members included parents whose children participated in charitably funded sport and people who had formerly participated in karate with the support of the Dream Brokers program. Stakeholders were also part of the team including Sask Sport and the Dream Brokers program.
The overall purpose of this constructivist grounded theory research was to examine the social and emotional benefits and barriers of traditional karate participation for children from low-income settings which had the potential to improve rates of sport participation for children from low-income settings. The specific objectives of this research were to: 1) Gain an understanding of the emotional and social benefits and barriers of karate for children from low-income settings from the perspective of children and their parents; 2) examine the social process involved in participation in sport for children from low-income settings; and, 3) create a substantive theory describing the experiences of parents and children in karate participation. The research was guided by the following questions: 1) What are the experiences of children who participate in karate and their parents?; and, 2) what are the underlying social processes that support or prevent children from low-income settings and their families to participate in karate?
Purposive and theoretical sampling were used to recruit 15 participants (eight children and seven parents) and thirty-four interviews were completed with the participants. Constant comparison was used to direct data analysis throughout the data gathering process, and initial coding, focused coding, and theoretical coding were completed. Multiple rounds of coding resulted in examining the underlying social problem discussed by participants indicating concerns about limited opportunities for children from low-income settings to belong to the larger community. This led to exploration of the basic social process titled, Finding Belonging in Sport. Finding Belonging in Sport became the core process from which the substantive grounded theory was developed and included three subprocesses and their obstacles: Physical Belonging (Knowledge, Cost, Child Independence, and, Transportation), Social Belonging (Having Fun, Making Friends, and, Dojo Norming), and Building Competence (Learning Karate Skills, Performing Karate Tests). In this study, children needed to accomplish the three subprocesses in order to experience Finding Belonging in Sport.
The substantive grounded theory has implications for nursing practice, education, and research. Nurses can assist families and guide sport and government organizations to improve supports for families from low-income settings. Nursing students can use the substantive grounded theory as a foundation for their assessments and activities for community practicums. There are opportunities for future research to test the substantive grounded theory with different populations, geographic regions, sports, and other health promotion activities
Automatic Speech Recognition for Documenting Endangered First Nations Languages
Get PDFAutomatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages is an active field of research. Over the past years with the advent of deep learning, impressive achievements have been reported using minimal resources. As many of the world’s languages are getting extinct every year, with every dying language we lose intellect, culture, values, and tradition which generally pass down for long generations. Linguists throughout the world have already initiated many projects on language documentation to preserve such endangered languages. Automatic speech recognition is a solution to accelerate the documentation process reducing the annotation time for field linguists as well as the overall cost of the project. A traditional speech recognizer is trained on thousands of hours of acoustic data and a phonetic dictionary that includes all words from the language. End-to-End ASR systems have shown dramatic improvement for major languages. Especially, recent advancement in self-supervised representation learning which takes advantage of large corpora of untranscribed speech data has become the state-of-the-art for speech recognition technology. However, for resource-constrained languages, the technology is not tested in depth. In this thesis, we explore both traditional methods of ASR and state-of-the-art end-to-end systems for modeling a critically endangered Athabascan language known as Upper Tanana. In our first approach, we investigate traditional models with a comparative study on feature selection and a performance comparison with deep hybrid models. With limited resources at our disposal, we build a working ASR system based on a grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) phonetic dictionary. The acoustic model can also be used as a separate forced alignment tool for the automatic alignment of training data. The results show that the GMM-HMM methods outperform deep hybrid models in low-resource acoustic modeling. In our second approach, we propose using Domain-adapted Cross-lingual Speech Recognition (DA-XLSR) for an ASR system, developed over the wav2vec 2.0 framework that utilizes pretrained transformer models leveraging cross lingual data for building an acoustic representation. The proposed system uses a multistage transfer learning process in order to fine tune the final model. To supplement the limited data, we compile a data augmentation strategy combining six augmentation techniques. The speech model uses Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) for an alignment free training and does not require any pronunciation dictionary or language model. Experiments from the second approach demonstrate that it can outperform the best traditional or end-to-end models in terms of word error rate (WER) and produce a powerful utterance level transcription. On top of that, the augmentation strategy is tested on several end-to-end models, and it provides a consistent improvement in performance. While the best proposed model can currently reduce the WER significantly, it may still require further research to completely replace the need for human transcribers
Vaccine Hesitancy in Canada: Scope, Determinants, and Impact of Trust in Parents of Two-Year Old Children
Get PDFVaccine hesitancy and trust are two factors impacting vaccine decisions for parents of preschoolers in Canada. However, previous research has left gaps in determining the prevalence and predictors of vaccine decisions (i.e., reluctance, refusal and delay) and the impact of whom parents trust for vaccine information on vaccine decisions. This thesis addressed these gaps through two papers using data from the 2017 Childhood National Immunization Coverage Survey(cNICS) of parents of 2-year-old children who were born in Canada and who had received at least one vaccine. Socio-demographics, vaccine decisions and vaccine knowledge, attitudes and beliefs (KAB) were described (proportion) and analyzed for associations (Chi Square) and predictors (Binomial multivariate logistic regression).
The objective of the first paper was to describe and examine the associations and predictors of vaccine decisions. The findings show that 16.8% of parents refused a vaccine for their child, specifically the influenza (73%), rotavirus (13%) and varicella (9%) vaccines; female parents or those from Quebec or the Territories were more likely to refuse. 12.8% were reluctant to accept a vaccine, most often the influenza (34%), measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) (21%) and varicella (19%) vaccines, but eventually accepted them due to advice from a health care provider. About one in eight (13.1%) had delayed a vaccine, most often because their child had health issues (54%) or was too young (18.6%) and was predicted by households of five or six people. Recent immigration to Canada decreased likelihood of refusal, delay, or reluctance; however, after 10 years in Canada, these parents were as likely to refuse or be reluctant as parents born in Canada. Poor KAB increased likelihood of refusal and delay by 5 times, and reluctance by 15 times, while moderate KAB also increased likelihood of refusal (1.6 times), delay (2.3 times) and reluctance (3.6 times).
The objective of the second paper was to determine the predictors and impact of whom parents trust for vaccine information. The findings show that 83% of parents trust doctors for vaccine information; 70-79% trust pharmacists, the Provincial Ministry of Health (PMH), nurses and Health Canada/Public Health Agency of Canada (HC/PHAC); 33% trust family and 22% trust friends and alternative health care providers (HCPs). However, parents found to have poor or moderate KAB were less likely to trust doctors, nurses, pharmacists, PMH and HC/PHAC. Parents were also less likely to trust the PMH or HC/PHAC if they had high school education or less or trade/college education, or were widowed, separated, or divorced. Parents who had never been reluctant to vaccinate their 2-year-old child were over 2 times more likely to trust doctors, nurses, pharmacists, PMH and HC/PHAC while parents who trusted family and friends were less likely to delay or refuse vaccines. There was regional variation within Canada. Parents from Quebec were most likely to trust doctors, nurses, pharmacists, friends, PMH and HC/PHAC. Parents from the Territories were less likely to trust doctors, nurses and pharmacists, but more likely to trust family. Parents were less likely to trust doctors if they were from the Prairies, and pharmacists if they were from BC, and parents from the Prairies and BC were less likely to trust HC/PHAC. Parents from Ontario were less likely to trust family or friends, but more likely to trust the PMH.
In addition to these findings, this study has demonstrated the importance of considering the temporal context as our results show that parents change their vaccine decisions over time (e.g., time since immigration to Canada, changes in marital status, or through conversations with HCPs). Given these findings, vaccine programming is needed that is focused on addressing parents’ concerns within their unique contexts, which ultimately, will protect children from vaccine preventable diseases
The Complexity of Community: Intervillage Migrations in the Illinois Country, 1699-1763
Get PDFThis Master’s thesis examines how social networks impacted the changing composition of French settler villages in the Illinois Country (present day Illinois and Missouri, USA), 1699-1763. More specifically, it analyzes the linkages between French settlers, Indigenous Illinois communities, and both enslaved Black and Indigenous peoples during a foundational period of migration and settlement. Rather than examining migration patterns to and from the Illinois Country, the focus of this thesis lies in examining intervillage migrations between six Illinois villages (Kaskaskia, Fort de Chartres, Prairie du Rocher, St. Philippe, Cahokia, and Ste. Geneviève). Though these villages have typically been portrayed as becoming increasingly French in character throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, this project rethinks the process of colonization by rethinking the ways in which intervillage migration created and maintained dynamic centres of exchange and cross-cultural contact. More broadly, the project contributes to a revaluation of the nature of colonialism for vast portions of French North America throughout the 18th century
Innovative teaching strategies in undergraduate veterinary medical imaging education
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Gender pay equity at a Simulated University with a Complex Compensation System
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A novel portable oxidation-reduction potential and microbial fuel cell-based sensor to monitor microbial growth
Get PDFBioremediation, the most environment-friendly soil remediation method, should receive adequate attention. However, its efficiency has often been criticized, reflecting the dearth of information about microbial activity in the soil. Biosensors can use the signals sent by microorganisms to quantify and analyze microbial activity. Therefore, combining biosensors with bioremediation can enhance the application of bioremediation technology.
This thesis focused on designing and fabricating of portable microbial fuel cell (MFC) and oxidation-reduction potential (ORP) based sensor to achieve in situ soil bioremediation application in the future. This is because conventional biosensors cannot reflect the detailed microbial growth characteristics during soil bioremediation.
During the experiment, two portable sensors were designed. First, two cylindrical polypropylene bottles were compressed tightly to form a preliminary sensor containing a proton exchange membrane (PEM), an O-ring, and a cathode electrode. After successfully testing the preliminary sensor’s workability, a smaller, easier-to-assemble 3D-printed sensor was designed based on the same concept.
The extracellular electrogenic bacterial Bacillus subtilis was used to test both sensors’ workability. MFC and ORP sensors provide voltage and redox potential outputs. By integrating real-time redox potential and voltage outputs, a typical microbial growth (potential parameter) curve can be created. The derivative optical density (OD) value (OD per hour) was found to correspond to the potential parameter. The preliminary sensor could acquire detailed microbial growth characteristics at 6.5 and 18 hours, and the 3D-printed sensor at 10 and 21 hours. The accompanying derivative OD values supported these conclusions. This novel sensor can monitor real-time microbial growth, report detailed growth characteristics in soil, and help select better bioremediation solutions.
Future work is required to improve the responsive of the 3D-printed sensor to achieve higher-resolution result
Mitigating the Drowning Hazard Below Weirs Using Submerged Vanes
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Wolseley Reinvented: Narratives About Nation-Building and Empire in Rural Saskatchewan During the First World War
Get PDFIn the early twentieth century, the community of Wolseley, Saskatchewan had a majority Protestant population with strong ties to the British empire. Despite being an agricultural settler community, when the First World War broke out, many of the men who enlisted had the opportunity to access an exemption as a farmer but felt a duty to enlist in the war and fight on behalf of the British Empire. Throughout the war, the community showed a high level of social and financial support for the war. The high enlistment numbers put a strain on agricultural production and the death or injury of young people brought trauma and grief to the community. One of the measures that the community took to commemorate their war dead and come to terms with their losses was the construction of a war memorial, the design of which reflects both traditional British memorials and the community’s Protestant identity. In the later years of the war and its aftermath, rhetoric surrounding the war increasingly favoured a narrative that the war’s purpose had been nation building. Because the Dominion of Canada, and the province of Saskatchewan especially, were relatively young at the start of the war, a national identity had not yet coalesced. Wolseley became one of many western Canadian communities who came to understand their participation in the war as a pillar of their civic identity and remembered their participation in the war as a contribution to Canada. Despite initial support for the war being rooted in an interest in supporting the empire, it became a source of pride in Wolseley that Canada had made valuable contributions to the war that were distinct from their connection to Britain