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Adolescents' Communicative Tone in Online Games: The Role of Context and Socio-Cognitive Abilities
No full textWhile the influx of online communication during adolescence has led to a plethora of research investigating adolescent communication through social media, other online platforms have not been afforded the same attention. Despite high rates of online gaming in adolescence and longstanding reports of communicative toxicity, little is known about many of the factors that could influence communication in this social context. In the present study, we examine how experimental manipulations of context (communicative mode, communicative partner, and prompts of perspective-taking) as well as individual differences in socio-cognitive skills influence the tone of adolescents’ communication within online games. Older adolescents, aged 15 to 19 (N = 238) participated in an immersive, simulated video game task wherein they received mildly provocative messages from teammates or opponents and responded verbally or via text. Game communication varied widely from aggressive (e.g., “You’re trash”) to prosocial (e.g., “Thanks Man”). Overall, participants were more aggressive when communicating verbally and when communicating with opponents. Perspective-taking prompts to consider the goals of the message-sender resulted in the reduction of these contextual differences by reducing prosociality towards teammates and in text-based communication. Marginal interactions between individual differences in self-reported perspective-taking and empathy and contextual manipulations indicate an interplay between socio-cognitive skills and contextual features for adolescents’ communicative tone. This work illuminates how some of the variability youth experience when gaming (Märtens et al., 2015) can be explained by game context and individual characteristics. Findings have practical relevance for adolescents and caregivers as they navigate decisions about game use. Moreover, this work adds to the growing literature as to how adolescents navigate communication in an increasingly online world and how socio-cognitive skills that are useful in offline social contexts translate to online environments
A Cumulative Effects Assessment approach to improving decision-making for freshwater resource protection and restoration
No full textThis thesis investigated ways to gather, archive, share and use the knowledge needed to inform effective Cumulative Effects Assessment (CEA) for freshwater ecosystem protection and restoration. Specifically, this thesis focuses on methods for collecting, managing, and applying long-term regional data needed to characterize baseline conditions and monitor cumulative effects by addressing the following four questions: 1) Can community-based monitoring (CBM) collect long-term regional biophysical data needed for effective CEA; 2) How can long-term regional freshwater data be managed and shared so that it is reusable for CEAs; 3) How can long-term regional surface water data be analyzed to estimate baseline conditions and identify areas impacted by cumulative effects; and 4) Can the restoration of water bodies impacted by cumulative effects be improved with knowledge that is foundational for effective CEAs? Results of a pan-Canadian analysis of CBM projects confirmed that CBMs can contribute robust, valuable long-term regional biophysical data to CEA. As part of this analysis, project characteristics that should be considered when designing CBM projects for integration/use in CEA were identified. Insights gained from interviews with technology sector experts guided the development of recommendations that will make freshwater data open and reusable within the freshwater science sector. Natural Range of Variation (NRV) calculations (Tukey Inner Fence or median ±2 median absolute deviation methods) were used to estimate surface water quality baselines which, when paired with Mann-Kendall trend analysis and spatial assessment of regional concentrations, provided a robust approach for assessing cumulative effects in freshwater ecosystems. Finally, known deficiencies in conventional approaches to urban water body restoration were addressed through application of the foundational elements of effective CEA to a case study of a degraded lake (Frame Lake) located in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. This thesis defines the types of information that should inform freshwater ecosystem decision-making and articulates how that information can be obtained, managed and used
Adaptation Pathways for Direct Air Capture Deployment in Canada
No full textThis study responds to the insufficient understanding of the uncertainties surrounding the demand, and the techno-economic and socio-political feasibility of deploying Direct Air Capture (DAC)—a Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technology that may be essential for Canada’s net-zero target and potential post-net-zero obligations. Limited tools are available to analyze such uncertainties and their interactions to support adaptive decision-making under deep uncertainty. These gaps are addressed through three interconnected, systems-based approaches: Integrated Assessment Modeling (IAM) for quantitative scenario modeling, Cross-Impact Balance (CIB) analysis for qualitative scenario discovery, and Adaptation Pathways (AP) for decision-support under deep uncertainty. First, existing IAM studies were systematically reviewed and a national-scale IAM analysis with the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) was conducted to quantify key uncertainties shaping DAC deployment in Canada. The following factors are found to strongly influence Canada’s potential reliance on DAC: Socio-economic pathways, fossil-fuel dependence, international CDR obligations grounded in burden-sharing principles, and DAC cost trajectories. Second, the CIB scenario discovery method is employed to examine how these uncertainties—and additional socio-political factors not represented in quantitative models—interact based on expert elicitation with DAC specialists. The CIB analysis produces 15 internally consistent futures and identifies public acceptance and policy coherence as critical bottlenecks if they evolve unfavourably. Third, CIB scenarios are used to parameterize GCAM to quantify DAC demand under four internally consistent, CIB-informed futures. This integrated approach shows that Canada’s DAC requirements could range from 0 to 300 MtCO₂/year by 2075, with narrative explanations linking each scenario’s structural components to its resulting DAC trajectory. Finally, the AP framework is applied to DAC policy, mapping flexible and dynamic strategies across three key dimensions: economic feasibility, electricity supply, and CO₂ transport and storage. APs identify low-regret near-term actions (e.g., electricity grid expansion), reveal thresholds where strategies fail, and indicate when strategic shifts are needed. Methodologically, this thesis demonstrates (1) how semi-quantitative tools such as CIB can validate and enrich IAM scenarios with socio-political dynamics, and (2) how APs can translate uncertainty-rich futures into robust, actionable policy pathways for DAC deployment in Canada. Together, these methods provide a comprehensive decision-support framework for navigating the deep uncertainties surrounding DAC deployment in Canada
Investigating Digital, Tangible, and Paper-Based Room Design at a Small Scale
No full textThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
GI ’25, Okanagan, BC, Canada
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s)
ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-1876-2/25/05
https://doi.org/10.1145/3769872.3769879Miniature representations, like CAD and blueprints, are useful for designing a larger physical space. While experts are trained to use these methods, non-experts often lack this training. Nonetheless, non-experts can benefit from designing with miniature representations, yet their interactions with these tools are not well understood. In our work, we observed participants designing two rooms using three tools: an online planner, pen and paper, and Lego. We collected and analyzed data from the Desirability Toolkit, a semistructured interview, and observations of their design sessions. Our findings suggest that participants found each tool engaging and satisfying for different reasons, but paper more empowering and Lego more familiar, efficient, and unconventional. Participants also suggested that these tools had value at different design stages. We also identified that participants often had difficulty scaling objects to match realistic expectations in the paper and Lego miniature representations.NSERC Discovery Grants, 2016-04422 || NSERC Discovery Grants, 2024-05124 || Ontario Early Researcher Award, ER15-11-184
Tool Wear Modeling for Application to Gear Shaping
No full textTool wear has a major impact on the productivity, economics, and sustainability of metal machining operations. While the topic of tool wear has been studied extensively for conventional metal cutting processes, like milling, turning, and drilling, there is a scarcity of studies in literature on modeling and predicting tool wear in gear machining operations. Gears, on the other hand, are essential components for a vast array of engineered systems, like automotive, aerospace, and various transportation vehicles, robotics, automation, and general machinery. This thesis has targeted developing a framework for the study and prediction of tool wear in the gear shaping operation. Gear shaping is among the most versatile methods of cutting gears.
In-house experiments were designed and performed to replicate the gear shaping process on a 5-axis milling machine. The kinematics were modeled, and custom NC code was generated and validated using polygon subtractions, to ensure that a gear shaping cutter would accurately produce a gear workpiece. The testing conditions were designed considering the physical capabilities of the machine tool, and the utilization of digital simulations of the gear cutting operation via ShapePro software (previously developed at the University of Waterloo), that predicts the kinematics, chip geometry, and cutting forces. As such, specimen gears were produced from AISI 1215 mild steel using HSS (high-speed steel) cutter material. The cutting edges and flanks of the tool were imaged throughout the tests, to monitor the development of wear. In the envelope of cutting speeds and feed rates that could be tested, only minimal wear was observed, and this was concentrated at the cutting tooth tips and corners, consistent with the prediction from ShapePro that these regions are subject to the largest chip thickness and longest distance of workpiece material cut. Nevertheless, these tests have demonstrated the proof-of-concept for performing shaping tests and progressively imaging the tool edges for wear. Future tests should focus on performing the cuts at more aggressive speeds and feeds to induce discernable wear.
To facilitate rapid characterization of tool wear for different workpiece and tool material pairs, an analogy testing method was also developed as an interrupted cutting operation on a lathe, designed to mimic cutting conditions similar to those in shaping. With this approach, a broader set of cutting speeds and feed rates could be explored in the machining of a similar kind of material (cold rolled 1020 steel). In this case, using HSS tooling brought practical limitations (e.g., built-up edge), thus the tooling material was changed to carbide. Nevertheless, a reasonable variation of cutting conditions could be implemented and tool wear progression data, as a function of cutting distance (and time) be documented.
This data has informed the development of a progression-based tool wear model for predicting flank wear in interrupted cutting, which is presented as a new contribution in this thesis. Established tool life models, such as Taylor and Colding, can predict the cutting time required for reaching only a single value of tool flank wear, whereas the proposed model can be used to predict when different values of tool wear would be reached without requiring re-calibration. More importantly, the proposed model can be integrated inside a time-domain simulation of an interrupted cutting operation, like gear shaping, in order to predict and update the wear state along each node on the tool edge, which classical tool life models cannot achieve, as they are ‘tuned’ to predict the cutting time until a preset wear is reached.
The proposed model, as well as Taylor and Colding models, were benchmarked with respect to the experimental wear data collected across 12 different cutting conditions, and they all performed comparably in predicting tool life, with average prediction errors of roughly 21%-24%, thus indicating some confidence in the proposed new model.
Future research should focus on collecting further data, both in gear shaping and analogy orthogonal testing experiments, to ensure further repeatability of the data, as well as validating that a tool wear model calibrated using the lower cost and faster analogy experiments can indeed predict the distribution of tool wear progression in the much more complex gear shaping operation. Furthermore, it is also advised to expand the wear model to predict uncertainty bounds along with the tool wear values themselves, and to expand the study into the machining of different kinds of metals, with different tools substrates and coatings
Negotiating Restoration through Representation: The role of visualization in the public process of Riverside Dam
No full textAs climate change intensifies ecological uncertainty and infrastructure risk, low-head dam removals have become sites where environmental, cultural, and political tensions converge. This thesis examines the case of Riverside Dam in Cambridge, Ontario (2008-2019), to explore how visualization acts not only as a tool of communication but as an active agent in shaping negotiations over the whether to remove, rebuild Riverside Dam. The Municipal Class Environmental Assessment (EA) for Riverside Dam including consultant drawings, City reports, and community responses based on eight “preferred alternative” designs for the dam. Visual materials play a decisive role in how potential futures are understood, aiding in understanding, participation, and decision-making. Drawings are political tools that can include or exclude voices, clarify or obscure impacts, and build or erode public trust. By closely studying the Municipal EA process for Riverside Dam, this thesis examines how values, trade-offs, and potential designs are communicated through visualizations and contested.
Drawing from literature on landscape architecture visualization studies, Indigenous knowledge systems, and environmental design, the thesis proposes a framework for negotiated design to better support engagement with the community. Negotiated design in this thesis is an approach to environmental planning and restoration that prioritizes structured dialogue and collaboration among diverse stakeholders with often competing interests. This framework is a call for transparency, accessibility, and legibility in architectural drawings in so that the public is aware of what is at stake with each “preferred alternative” within the Environmental Assessment process. Within the proposed framework, this thesis lays out four visualization principles including: 1) contextual clarity, 2) embodied perspectives, 3) temporal layering, and 4) making conflict visible. Engagement principles also emphasize the use of physical space, co-creation, and writeable, decision-oriented drawings.
Rather than producing an original design proposal, this thesis reinterprets three existing shortlisted design options (or “preferred alternatives”) for the Riverside dam: rebuilding, removing and naturalizing, and building an offline dam and naturalizing the river. Through different forms of visualization, the framework developed in the thesis are applied to visualize trade-offs, reveal biases, and imagine the realities of each design to best engage and educate the public. These River drawings are not final answers but rather invitations for further negotiation.
By centering legibility over resolution, this work positions visualizing ecological projects as a collaborative and evolving act. It contributes to broader conversations on climate resilience and adaptation, decolonial landscape practice, and the role of design in environmental governance
Portus: Linking Alloy with SMT-based Finite Model Finding
No full text© 2025 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Alloy is a well-known, formal, declarative language for modelling systems early in the software development process. Currently, it uses the Kodkod library as a back-end for finite model finding. Kodkod translates the model to a SAT problem; however, this method can often handle only problems of fairly low-size sets and is inherently finite. We present Portus, a method for translating Alloy into an equivalent many-sorted first-order logic problem (MSFOL). Once in MSFOL, the problem can be evaluated by an SMT-based finite model finding method implemented in the Fortress library, creating an alternative back-end for the Alloy Analyzer. Fortress converts the MSFOL finite model finding problem into the logic of uninterpreted functions with equality (EUF), a decidable fragment of first-order logic that is well-supported in many SMT solvers. We compare the performance of Portus with Kodkod on a corpus of 63 Alloy models written by experts. Our method is fully integrated into the Alloy Analyzer.This research was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Re search Council of Canada (NSERC), Compute Ontario (https://www.computeontario.ca) and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (alliance.can.ca)
Jewish Women in the Concentration Camp System in Germany, 1933-1945
No full textThis Master’s Research Paper examines the experiences of Jewish women in the three women’s concentration camps of Nazi Germany: Moringen, Lichtenburg, and Ravensbrück in chronological order from 1933 until 1945. With the exception of various early provisional concentration camps in the early 1930s and women’s subcamps of former men’s camps towards the end of the war, women were largely relegated to one camp at a time (Moringen 1933-1938, Lichtenburg 1937-1939, Ravensbrück 1939-1945). As a result, studying the experiences of these women as they were transferred from one camp to the next throughout the Nazi period allows us to examine how women’s concentration camp experiences evolved and changed over time. In studying specifically the experiences of Jewish women, we see not only how gender, but also race, affected the treatment and experiences of female prisoners in these camps. Ultimately, the three main camps reflect both Nazi policies and social movements which affected how long Jewish women stayed in the camps, the reasons given for their arrest, and how they were treated and categorized within the camps. The secondary focus of this project was to examine life within the camps, how these women reacted to their imprisonment, how they survived months or even years in the concentration camp system, and how they interacted with fellow non-Jewish prisoners.
Organized into three main sections (one for each camp examined) with some subsections to focus on particular aspects of each camp, this paper follows the development of the women’s concentration camp system in a chronological order. The lengthy introduction seeks to establish the origins of the Nazi concentration camp system, the particular difficulties in studying Jewish and female prisoners in the earliest camps, the subject of gender in historical analysis, and the available historiography on this topic. The section on Moringen is divided into two parts. The first section deals with the organization of the Moringen concentration camp, including an examination of the available primary sources which discuss the separation of Jewish women into their own “Judensaal” (Jewish Hall). The second section examines daily life within Moringen. Lichtenburg is examined in only one section, both because it served as a women’s camp for just over one year and because there are few sources dedicated to this camp. The final two sections examine Ravensbrück. Part 1 deals with the first period (1939-1942) in which Jewish women were imprisoned in the camp, ending with the final deportations of Jewish women to Auschwitz in the Fall of 1942 after which the camp remained “Judenrein” (“free of Jews”) for a short while. Part 2 on Ravensbrück deals with the late war years in the camp and the declining conditions from 1943 until liberation in 1945 during which thousands of Jewish women entered the camp from eastern camps and ghettos.
This paper contributes to the historiography on gender and race in the German concentration camp system by examining both the development of the concentration camp system for women and the particular experiences and daily life and survival of Jewish women from 1933 until 1945
Studies on the Characterization and Measurement Optimization of Superconducting Microwave Resonators
No full textThis work presents a study aimed at improving the accuracy and efficiency of low-temperature loss-tangent measurements in superconducting resonators. Measurements were performed on aluminum and niobium devices, where a plateau in the internal quality factor at the single-photon level was observed, consistent with prior reports. By truncating the acquired resonance data, it was shown that the loss tangent experienced no systematic shift even when only four points spanned the resonance linewidth; the resulting increase in uncertainty was attributed to reduced effective averaging. Based on this result, an optimized data acquisition scheme was developed, reducing measurement time by a factor of four while maintaining approximately 1% accuracy. Further improvements were achieved through the use of a lower-noise HEMT amplifier, which reduced measurement noise and decreased acquisition time to 60% of the original. Additional circuit modifications showed that improved infrared shielding reduced total resonator loss, while the nonlinear behavior at high RF power was attributed to intrinsic device nonlinearity rather than external circuitry. Finally, crossover temperature measurements showed agreement with BCS theory at high temperatures, although its accuracy could be limited by not fully saturated TLS-loss, indicating the need for improved device designs
Selbstbestimmt: The Woman in Contemporary German Women’s Filmmaking
No full textWomen’s representation in film has become an increasingly relevant topic in gender and film discourse, challenging the postfeminist claim that gender equality has been achieved and feminist critique is no longer necessary. German cinema in particular has recently experienced renewed scrutiny for its evident gender inequality, with scholarship pointing to the underrepresentation of women both on and off the screen, a pattern that reflects enduring structural barriers within the industry. Despite graduating in equal numbers as men from film schools, women direct fewer than 25% of the feature films released in Germany, receive less than 20% of all available funding, and are significantly underrepresented as directors, writers, and producers. At the same time, female figures in German films are “visible but not diverse:” the average German cinematic woman is slim, white, heterosexual, in her teens, twenties, or thirties, and more likely to be shown in the context of relationships or partnerships than in work environments. Yet when women occupy key filmmaking positions, not only do they work with more women behind the screen, but they also construct more complex female characters, foregrounding female subjectivity in diverse contexts.
This dissertation attaches itself to questions of women’s representation in German cinema by examining three contemporary films directed by women in order to to explore how they engage with womanhood through their female protagonists. The first, both chronologically and analytically, is Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016), which centres on the relationship between business consultant Ines and her father, who unexpectedly visits her. An international critical and commercial success, Toni Erdmann has exerted wide influence on the German cinematic landscape, drawing significant attention on its portrayal of gendered subjectivity. The second is Annika Pinske’s Alle reden übers Wetter (2022), which follows doctoral candidate Clara’s return to her hometown to celebrate her mother’s birthday. Despite being the most recent of the three films analyzed, Alle reden übers Wetter is placed after Toni Erdmann due to its contextual and aesthetic parallels to Ade’s film, as Pinske—the only director among the three who hails from the former East, a rarity among German women filmmakers—worked closely with Ade and adopts a similarly realist aesthetic in her debut feature, which presents a range of multidimensional female characters. Finally, the dissertation examines Sherry Hormann’s Nur eine Frau (2019), which dramatizes the life of Hatun “Aynur” Sürücü, a German woman of Kurdish background who was murdered by her brother at a Berlin bus stop in 2005. The film is discussed last not only because it diverges from Ade’s and Pinske’s works through its highly stylized form, but also because it engages with a distinct subject matter—migration and Islam—through a real-life case that remains central to German debates on cultural difference and integration.
A close reading of the formal and narrative strategies in these films reveals a multifaceted engagement with gendered subjectivity by contemporary German women directors, whose protagonists are constructed as complex characters navigating intersecting pressures and gendered demands. Central to these trajectories is the pursuit of self-determination, which emerges across all three works as an ongoing process marked by the continuous negotiation of often conflicting roles—as daughters, mothers, partners, and friends. While these films stop short of articulating a collective dimension of self-determination, instead adopting an individualized lens reflecting postfeminist discourse, they nonetheless articulate a shared feminist consciousness by exposing and challenging gendered scripts and essentialist notions of womanhood. By foregrounding self-determination as an analytical lens, this dissertation demonstrates how these films articulate feminist modes of resistance on screen while their production contexts reveal parallel struggles for autonomy off screen. Moreover, by bringing two largely unexamined films into scholarly conversation—Alle reden übers Wetter and Nur eine Frau—the project expands the representational and analytical space of German women’s filmmaking and illuminates the diverse ways women directors intervene in, reshape, and critically reimagine dominant cultural narratives about womanhood. Ultimately, the analysis shows that contemporary German women filmmakers and their protagonists enact a mode of agency and resistance that foregrounds their struggle to live and create selbstbestimmt