MacEwan Open Journals (MacEwan University)
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Ecosystem Map: A Systemic View of Edmonton\u27s Transit System
No full textEdmonton\u27s Transit System (ETS) is a multi-faceted, rider-driven transportation system, making it an excellent candidate for Design thinking and System Mapping. ETS operates within the larger City of Edmonton System and has complex pain points regarding safety and security both within and outside of their direct control. The top of the map shows the system hierarchy and the interdependent relationship between the ETS System and the Rider Experience. Rider Experience affects riders\u27 willingness to participate in the ETS System (Ridership), affecting the ETS System through funding and budget. The Community Partners, Emergency Services, and ETS Personnel chart within the hierarchy shows the top-level influence of these stakeholders within the greater ETS system. The second portion of the infographic highlights the Riders\u27 Journey, illustrated by a Journey Map divided into each phase of ETS\u27s System. Riders navigate various obstacles: Phase 1: Stop Experience, Phase 2 Station Experience, and Phase 3 - Onboard Experience. The final portion of the infographic is the inventory of touchpoints defined by phase within the ETS system. Touchpoints are categorized by interaction type: Information, Actors/Stakeholders, Safety Features, and Security Risks. Each touchpoint type is indicated through iconography, defining the different characteristics of that interaction. Finally, the User/Rider loops back into the top-level, outlining the interconnected nature of the System. Analysis of the ETS Ecosystem through a Design Thinking Lens and User-Centered approach enables a deeper understanding of the ETS System as a whole and how to best proceed when designing future solutions.
Department: Design
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Isabelle Speran
Experimental Type - The City by Rad Bradbury Part I
No full textThe City by Ray Bradbury is about an unpopulated planet far from the Earth. The city waited twenty thousand years for the men to arrive and designed to kill them to seek revenge because they were the enemies who abolished Taollans twenty thousand years ago. The first part mainly describes what the city looks like and how the men arrive. It started from a peaceful arrival that made the men keep going to see what was in the city. The city’s senses speak to each other, as the Ears and the Nose take in information about the visitors and ask the Eyes to watch them as they explore. One of the men senses something familiar about the place. The men begin to panic as the city fully awakens. The layout’s design pulls inspiration from the flow of the story.
The first page reflects how the arrival of men is peaceful. The text is also left-justified to portray how everything is going evenly. It is where the city is trying to gain the men’s trust to stay longer. However, the second page talks about how the city lures the men and traps them. Some men have mixed feelings about the city, and the city’s senses are starting to wake up. The idea behind the bad rags and different placement of texts is to show the chaos happening to the story. The city’s dialogue is calmer, depicting its actions. It’s in a serif typeface to show that the city is old, and the men’s dialogue is more disorganized as they start to question and get a discernment that something is wrong with the city. It is in sans-serif to portray a modern feel.
The city’s senses are in sans-serif and bold to highlight the city’s covert actions. Additionally, it has glitching background elements, mainly on the second page, describing the chaos and violence as the city traps and tries to wipe the men out.
Department: Design
Faculty Mentor: Constanza Pacher
 
Bioautography As a Method For Testing For Antimicrobial Compounds in Noxious Weeds From Alberta
No full textThe threat of rising antimicrobial resistance in society makes the discovery of novel antimicrobial compounds more important than ever before. Natural substances, such as bacteria and fungi, are a common source of antimicrobial drugs. Plants offer great potential in this regard, as their potential for containing novel compounds has been underexplored. Noxious weeds in Alberta are of particular interest because their phytochemical composition has not been fully studied, and they have been shown to disrupt soil microbe composition. One of the main hurdles of identifying phytochemicals that have antimicrobial activities is the slow and inefficient extraction and isolation of bioactive compounds. TLC-bioautography aims to simplify the identification of bioactive compounds by coupling the separation and testing of extracts together. This project’s aim is to develop a reliable method of screening plant extracts for antimicrobial compounds using TLC-bioautography. The method was developed using plant extracts known to contain antimicrobial compounds to ensure activity was detectable. The separation of the extracts was optimized on TLC before directly overlying with Mueller-Hinton Agar inoculated with bacteria. Lack of bacterial growth was observed around some spots on the TLC plate, indicating antimicrobial activity. Overall, our results show bioautography has the potential to quickly screen plant extracts for antimicrobial compounds. Having a method that can quickly screen for antimicrobials will help shorten the time it takes to research weeds of interest and isolate new and effective antimicrobials.
Department: Biological Sciences
Faculty Mentors: Dr. Kimberley Harcombe and Dr. Tina Bot
Post-management dietary dynamics in spottail shiner (Notropis hudosonius) and trout-perch (Percopsis omiscomaycus) from 2009-2011 and 2013 in Lac la Biche, Alberta
No full textPiscivorous fish stocking is a popular restoration strategy used to sustain fisheries as they provide quick recreational fishing benefits. However, fluctuations in predatory abundance could impose top-down effects on lower trophic level fish species like spottail shiner (Notropis hudosonius) and trout-perch (Percopsis omiscomaycus) resulting in dietary shifts. In 2005, the Lac lac Biche Alberta Fisheries Restoration Program was created to address depressed walleye (Sander vitreus) populations due to overfishing. Predatory double-crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) were culled and their eggs oiled, and walleye stocks were added to the lake in 2006 to restore walleye populations. The objectives of this research are to understand the diets of spottail shiner and trout-perch and to observe if the spottail shiner diet shifted after management. Stomach contents of thirty-five spottail shiners and ten trout-perch across Lac la Biche, Alberta from 2009-2011and 2013 were analyzed for four prey groups: macroinvertebrates, zooplankton, phytoplankton, and microplastics. Phytoplankton was the most consumed prey group in both spottail shiners and trout-perch, representing over 61% and 78% respectively of their diets. Phytoplankton and zooplankton consumption decreased whereas macroinvertebrate consumption increased. Sphaeriidae, Chironomidae, Chyprididae, and Stephanodiscaceae were consumed throughout all sampled years, although there were fluctuations in Cyprididae, Chironomidae, and Sphaeriidae between years, possibly demonstrating top down-effects on macroinvertebrate species prey abundance. An average of four microplastics were found in the stomachs of both species and consumption remained stable throughout 2009-2013. Evidence of top-down effects on spottail shiner and trout-perch diets due to walleye stocking is still unclear, as other possible indicators like pollution, could pose potential alternative stressors on feeding behaviors of lower trophic level species.
However, this study increases the knowledge of spottail shiner and trout-perch diets, fosters research on understanding this little-studied biota, and informs future policy and management practice.
Department: Biology
Faculty Mentors: Dr. David Locky and Dr. Mrinal Da
Texture Classification of Manito Lake Stromatolites
No full textInformation on stromatolite formation and development has been evolving as more examples are examined. Manito Lake located near the western border of Saskatchewan is a saline lake that exhibits many different forms of stromatolites and microbialites, mostly developed throughout the Holocene. Upon looking at the textures of these various recent stromatolites, comparisons can be made between the different textures and their formation processes. To accomplish this, thin sections were taken from various microbialites in the Manito lake area and examined under a Zeiss Axio Scope A1 petrographic microscope. Each sample was analysed for microbial and crystal textures typical of stromatolite growth observed in ancient and modern settings in order to assign a classification to each sample. They were also looked at for the presence of organic matter to test correlation between these organics and the crystalline structures. As stromatolite textural classification becomes more common and widespread, it will also become easier for comparisons to be made across samples. Along with this, further understanding of texture can assist in understanding the true nature of stromatolite formation processes.
Department: Physical Sciences
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Hilary Corlet
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Psychopathic Traits, Priming, and Costly Helping
No full textPsychopathy is characterized by traits such as callousness, impulsivity, manipulation, and incapability of empathy. Research suggests that those high in psychopathic traits are incapable of altruism, yet recent studies have reported that psychopaths may engage in heroic helping, and that low levels of everyday helping behaviour can be mediated by prosocial priming. The present study seeks to investigate how psychopathic traits influence costly helping (i.e., helping another at a cost to oneself) as a function of a helping prime (no prime, prosocial, asocial, antisocial) and the remoteness of a charity (on-campus, local, national, international).
Participants (N = 320) will complete measures of mood, psychopathic traits, and empathy, followed by random assignment into one of the helping prime conditions. Following this, participants will play a standardized game designed to measure costly helping (i.e., the Altruism/Antisocial Game; AlAn’s Game; Sakai et al., 2012), that will involve decisions regarding monetary donations to one of four charities that vary according to their level of remoteness.
Throughout the game, participants will distribute $20 between themselves and the charity via their decisions. After the game, participants will be asked to make a real-time choice regarding how they want their participation funds distributed between themselves and the charity (i.e., do you want to donate all or some of the money to the charity or keep it for yourself?). This study has implications for understanding psychopathic traits in the context of costly helping, including whether priming and mood change either of the giving decision outcomes.
Department: Psychology
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kristine Peac
How Living with Pets and Others Relates to Wellbeing During the COVID-19 Pandemic
No full textThe pandemic has been a time marked by significant hardship for many. It has led to significant negative impacts on mental health (MH), and significant limitations for people to connect and find support through socialization. As a result, many have turned to animals as a substitute for human connection, evidenced by large increases in animal adoptions and purchases during the pandemic. Research suggests that in many contexts, animal ownership and companionship may help improve MH. However, during the pandemic, living with an animal could be a burden (e.g., due to financial pressures) and have a negative impact on MH. To this end, our study investigated how living with animals during the pandemic was related to MH. Participants (N=600) were recruited from MacEwan University and asked about several topics related to MH, their living situation (i.e., did they live with pets, other people, alone, or some combination), and other demographic factors. Analyses revealed that living with a pet during the pandemic was related to increased levels of anxiety and depression, as well as decreased happiness. However, for pet owners, stronger attachment to their pet was associated with less anxiety. Additionally, our data provided confirmatory support for several established findings such as there being a positive correlation between COVID-19 stress and general feelings of anxiety and depression, and a negative correlation between COVID-19 stress and feelings of happiness. Our results expand knowledge on the impact of human-animal interaction and MH, particularly when related to a global health emergency.
Department: Psychology
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Eric Legg
Effects of Context on Perceptions of Suicide Referents
No full textSuicide is perceived as immoral and is highly stigmatized, possibly reflecting language use surrounding instances of suicide. The current study extends recent research showing that a suicide depicted as immoral is associated with an increased preference for the phrase “committed suicide” over “died by suicide” relative to a suicide depicted neutrally. Undergraduate participants (N = 204) were randomly assigned to read about a suicide depicted as vengeful or altruistic. They then judged how acceptable the family would find statements employing “committed suicide” and alternative statements employing “ended his[her] life”, “took his[her] own life,” and “died by suicide”. Between-group differences were examined with analysis of variance. Results showed that the alternative phrases were deemed to be more acceptable for the altruistic suicide than for the vengeful suicide. We consider implications for stigma surrounding suicide and its reduction.
Keywords: suicide, stigma, language
Department: Psychology
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Andrew Howel
I\u27m Just a Rhetorical Dirtbag, Baby
No full text Rhetoric has acquired a bad reputation in the modern age. Many hear the word in contemporary news and discourse and ideologically wince. It has gone from a neutral term to one that connotes deception and ill-intent. Rhetoric has also unfairly become synonymous with the Right-wing. In the following piece, I will argue that not only must rhetoric be stripped of its pejorative connotations, but that the spice and flair the Right unapologetically utilize must be wielded by the Left, with ethical moderations, of course. This piece will show how, by abandoning the pointless and outdated notions of impartiality and decorum, the Left can be more effective communicators and finally be on a level playing field with the Right.
This paper was written as part of a course on Modern and Classical Rhetoric