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"Unvaxxed and uninvited : Christians whose communities worshipped without them during a pandemic”
Get PDF1 online resource (50 pages) : colour illustrationsIncludes abstract and appendices.Includes bibliographical references (pages 28, 35-36, 44).“Unvaxxed and Uninvited” is a social constructivist phenomenological study that describes the experiences of six unvaccinated Christians who could not attend worship during the Coronavirus pandemic due to their vaccination status. Themes emerging from participant interviews are presented in three experiential spectrums: from suffering to forgiveness, from fear to hope, and from isolation to community. Pastoral implications of this study rooted in the mystical image of “Divine Mercy” suggest that further exploration of issues such as clericalism, technology use and communication strategies may be helpful in overcoming church division
Patterns of vegetation structural diversity across heterogeneous landscapes in southwestern Nova Scotia
Get PDF1 online resource (88 pages) : colour illustrations, colour maps, colour charts, graphs (some colour)Includes abstract and appendices.Includes bibliographical references (pages 14-21, 45-52, 74-81).Forest edges, including transitional areas between forest and non-forest areas, outline the
overall structure of the landscape. To assess and quantify patterns of structural diversity across natural and harvested landscapes in southwestern Nova Scotia, I used field-based structural diversity metrics and UAV imagery along two 1250 m transects to examine different aspects of the pattern of structural diversity across transitions in forested landscapes. For traditional field metrics, tree structural diversity had more success in determining transitions than functional plant group diversity, as tree structural diversity detected all edge types compared to just anthropogenic edges when using functional plant group diversity. For photogrammetrically derived metrics, no metric detected transitions at all edges and overall UAV metrics were incompatible with field sampling. Future studies should examine the compatibility of LiDAR and structural diversity metrics
Two-eyed critical sensemaking
Get PDF1 online resource (195 pages) : chartsIncludes abstract and appendices.Includes bibliographical references (pages 163-182).The research method, Two-Eyed Critical Sensemaking, is a novel integrative approach for
studying the relationship between policy documents and enactments of respectful reconciliation focused organizational change. Drawing from the guiding principle of Etuaptmumk/Two Eyed Seeing, I define six iterative methodological steps that weave together two qualitative critical research approaches - Culturally Relevant Gender-Based Analysis (CRGBA), an Indigenous-led view of applied policy studies, and Critical Sensemaking, a Canadian-led view of management and organization studies. I use the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada as a case study to demonstrate the function of the Two-Eyed Critical Sensemaking method. The TRC sparked public concern regarding Canada-Indigenous reconciliation and a discursive shift that
transformed reconciliation into a defining political issue in Canada. But, the meaning of
reconciliation is inconsistently used in practice. I propose the TRC presents a model for
reconciliation-oriented organizational change for Canadian administrators responding to the Commission’s Calls to Action
Investigation of the excitation spectrum of [superscript8]He via deuteron inelastic scattering
Get PDF1 online resource (xi, 83, 1 unnumbered pages) : colour illustrations, charts (chiefly colour), graphs (chiefly colour)Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (pages 78-83).Halo nuclei form due to weak binding at extreme proton-neutron asymmetries near driplines and these uncovered alterations in nuclear shell structure. These halos can exhibit a phenomenon known as a soft dipole resonance. It was postulated that 2+ state of 8He may be a mixed with lowlying soft dipole resonance state but it is an unsettled issue. In this work, the deuteron inelastic scattering off a neutron halo nucleus, 8He, has been studied in inverse kinematics at the IRIS facility at TRIUMF. This study presents findings of first excited state at E = 3.57 ± 0.02 MeV with resonance width of 0.64 ± 0.06 MeV along with the ground state. The possibility of absence of low-energy soft dipole resonance in the extracted excitation spectrum might be due to the stronger binding of 8He. There is also no intruder s-orbital known in 8He which can allow L=1 particle-hole excitation.</p
2023-11-17 Senate Minutes and Agendas
No full textMinutes and agenda for the November 17th, 2023 meeting of Saint Mary’s University Senate
Offspring provisioning rates in an urban passerine : do they change with parental age?
Get PDF1 online resource (30 pages) : colour illustrations, colour maps, graphsIncludes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (pages 27-30).Studies have shown that offspring provisioning is one of the most demanding of parental
activities in terms of both time and energy. European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) are a socially monogamous yet facultatively polygynous passerine species. They exhibit biparental care in which both parents incubate the eggs and provision the offspring. Adult European starlings return to the study site to breed every year, making them an ideal species to examine the relationship between parental age and offspring provisioning rates. They have hackle (throat) feathers whose iridescent length allows classification of adults into one of two age categories 1) second year (SY, first-time breeders), or 2) after second year (ASY). The objective of my study was to examine offspring provisioning rates by both male and female parents who have been observed over at least two years. I predicted that adult males and females would provision their offspring at a higher rate than they did when they were younger (in the prior year). In support of my predictions, ASY males tended to provision the brood at a higher rate on days 7 or 8 of the nestling period. However, ASY males on day 13 or 14 of the nestling period tended to have a lower provisioning rate (provisions/hr/nestling) than when they were a year younger. I found no
significant differences between the provisioning rates of ASY females on days 7 or 8 and 13 or 14 of the nestling period, which did not support my predictions. There were no significant differences in the number of provisions/nestling/hr made by SY or ASY males or females on day 7 or 8 of the nestling period. Understanding whether parental investment changes with parental age and how this might affect the reproductive success of European starlings is important in aiding the global population decline in avian species
Mate fidelity in a double-brooded urban passerine
Get PDF1 online resource (29 pages) : graphsIncludes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (pages 23-25).Every bird requires a mate to have a successful breeding attempt. After each brood, they are faced with the choice to stay with or separate from this mate. The choice to stay together is referred to as mate fidelity and can benefit the future reproductive success of the pairs who exhibit it. Despite these benefits, separation is still common in many populations of passerines, leading to the question of the costs of mate fidelity and under what circumstances these might outweigh the benefits. In this study, I examined the frequency of mate fidelity in a population of urban dwelling European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) over 15 years. Mate fidelity or subsequent separation events were then compared to average brood condition of each brood raised together to test if any correlation between them existed. Tests were run between the first and last brood raised by a faithful pair, and between the first brood from a faithful pair and the first and only brood raised by a pair that subsequently separated to determine if brood condition
affected fidelity in the population. While mean brood condition followed the prediction that
broods preceding fidelity would be higher in condition than those which preceded separation, the difference between the two categories was not statistically significant in either test. These findings still warrant investigation, as the difference in condition was noticeable, and sample sizes were small, so we may have lacked the statistical power to detect such influence. Brood condition could still influence the frequency of mate fidelity within this population along with other possibilities
The effect of hybridization on Killifish (Fundulus spp.) metabolic rate
Get PDF1 online resource (35 pages) : illustrations (some colour), colour maps, charts (some colour), graphsIncludes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (pages 31-35).Interspecific hybridization occurs when two species successfully mate to produce offspring. This phenomenon is relatively common in nature and can produce hybrids with
advantaged, disadvantaged, or intermediate physiology compared to parental species. To better understand the outcomes of hybridization, I studied two species of fish, the Banded Killifish (Fundulus diaphanus) and the Common Killifish (F. heteroclitus), and their inter-specific hybrids. In the wild, female F. diaphanus and male F. heteroclitus can naturally hybridize to produce all-female asexual clones. To compare the physiology of these Killifish hybrids to their parental species, I measured the resting metabolic rates (RMR) and maximal metabolic rates (MMR) of the three species to determine their aerobic scope (difference between RMR and MMR). I predicted that the hybrids would have an aerobic scope above that of F. diaphanus but below that of F. heteroclitus, as they display intermediate values in other physiological traits. The resting and maximal aerobic metabolic rates of Killifish caught from Porters Lake, Nova Scotia were measured using intermittent-flow respirometry. RMR was measured while fish were resting, after a short acclimation period, whereas MMR was measured after fish were swam to exhaustion using the chase method. It can be difficult to distinguish between F. heteroclitus and
hybrids visually, so I also measured distinctive morphological traits and genotyped the
mitochondrial DNA to confirm species identities. Unfortunately, I was unable to collect
sufficient data for inter-specific MMR comparisons, but RMR data suggests that these Killifish hybrids have similar RMR to both parental species. To assess aerobic scope, additional MMR data is required
Enhancing satellite trail detection in night sky imagery with automatic salience thresholding
Get PDF1 online resource (ix, 81 pages) : illustrations (some colour), charts (some colour), graphs (some colour)Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (pages 77-81).This study proposes a novel automatic thresholding method called Automatic Salience Thresholding (AST) for creating binary masks for detecting satellite streaks in night sky imagery. The approach utilizes a combination of Gaussian filtering, a salience-based thresholding technique, shape-based morphological filtering and line detection using Probabilistic Hough Transformations to identify the satellite trail in the image. We evaluated our method on diverse datasets of night sky images containing satellite trails in varying lighting conditions. The results show that AST outperforms the compared methods when tested with several performance metrics. The proposed AST method was also used to generate annotated binary masks for Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image data with promising results
Cenozoic basin evolution and petroleum system characterization within the Tangier 3D seismic survey, central Scotian Slope, Canada
Get PDF1 online resource (xxi, 269 pages) : illustrations (some colour), maps (some colour), charts (some colour), graphsIncludes abstract and appendices.Includes bibliographical references (pages 41-49, 60-61, 142-146, 199-204, 211-213).Undiscovered hydrocarbon reservoirs potentially exist in the deep-water regions of the Scotian Margin off the coast of Nova Scotia. The deep-water environments can involve major challenges with high exploration risk because the presence, quality, size, and distribution of source and reservoir rocks are still relatively unknown for many areas. Using the Tangier 3D Seismic Survey, seismic interpretation and attribute analysis within the Cenozoic was conducted. The results show the region hosts a complex subsurface geology with modern-day and paleo-channels and canyons, contourite sediment drifts, slope failure complexes, and proglacial slope drapes. Salt-related structural features, which occur deeper than 3 km in the basin, include welds, wings, feeders, pedestals, rollers, withdrawal minibasins, rafted overburden, and growth and crestal faults. Also
observed within the Tangier 3D area are three shallow-level amplitude anomalies interpreted to be direct hydrocarbon indicators (DHIs). The DHIs situated above diapirs and a salt canopy strongly indicate the presence of migrating fluids. The architectural investigation of these DHIs provides evidence of a working petroleum system governed by salt mobility, which provides migration pathways for the more deeply sourced fluids. However, further study is needed to determine if the fluids filling these DHIs are thermogenic hydrocarbons that escaped from deeper Jurassic or Cretaceous sources and breached reservoirs