1722 research outputs found
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Extremism and Radicalization to Violence Prevention in Manitoba: A Resource for Educators
Get PDFExtremism and Radicalization to Violence Prevention in Manitoba (ERiM) is a made-in-Manitoba resource for educators. Funded by Public Safety Canada, this document was created in collaboration with educators and education stakeholders and intended for use in Manitoba schools. The purpose of this guide is to develop educator awareness, knowledge, and capacity in order to build resilience in youth and to help prevent radicalization to violence."This guide was made possible by funding from Public Safety Canada.
Using nematode traits to evaluate the effects of topography and grazing on the function of wet grassland soils
Get PDFUnderstanding belowground impacts of livestock in rangelands is critical to developing sustainable grazing practices. This is particularly the case in wet grasslands, which face increased pressures in the timing and intensity of grazing in a changing climate. To understand the coupled effects of topography and grazing on wet grassland soils, I examined the generic diversity, feeding composition, and traits of soil nematode communities. I collected nematodes from grazed and ungrazed upland prairies and wet meadows in southern and central Manitoba. Nematodes were extracted from fresh soil cores, counted, identified to the genus level, and assigned to feeding groups. I measured morphological, metabolic, and reproductive traits for a subset of dominant nematode genera and calculated community-weighted means and variances of five nematode traits (length, greatest body diameter, mass, b-ratio, average number of gonads). Topography and grazing did not affect the alpha and beta diversity of nematode genera. However, wet meadows and grazed treatments were characterized by a higher proportion of bacteria-feeding nematodes. On average, larger nematodes with lower b-ratios (i.e., longer esophagus relative to body length) dominated wet meadow soils compared to upland prairie soils. Grazing significantly interacted with topography to result in community-weighted means and variances of nematode traits that were similar across topography. The observed changes in nematode feeding composition and traits suggest that topography and grazing may alter rates of carbon and nutrient cycling in wet grassland soils. This study reinforces the ability of nematode communities, particularly their traits, to serve as valuable bioindicators of soil function in changing environments.Nature Conservancy of Canada; Mitacs; Manitoba Beef Producers; Canadian Agriculture Partnership; and the University of Winnipeg.Master of Science in Bioscience, Technology, and Public Polic
Estimated Detection Limits of Carboxylates in Palagonite by X-ray Diffraction and Reflectance Spectroscopy
Get PDFLow molecular weight carboxylates (carbonates, oxalates, formates, and acetates) are either known or are expected to be present on the surface of Mars. Previous work has suggested these phases to be present in Gale Crater materials at nearly the expected detection limit (LOD) for crystalline materials with the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL)Curiosity rover CheMin X-ray diffraction (XRD) instrument. Detection limits of these materials by CheMin-like XRD and reflectance spectroscopy are poorly constrained, thus leading to uncertainties in detectability with these types of instruments. I have filled this knowledge gap by making intimate mixtures of a variety of carboxylates with the JSC Mars-1a regolith analogue material and measured their XRD patterns with a CheMin-like breadboard and reflectance spectra with instruments analogous to the SuperCam instrument on the Mars Perseverance rover. I used simple linear regression to create calibration curves to estimate LODs and compared and contrasted ten different LOD calculations previously used for XRD. I found that the carboxylates measured have LODs near 1.0 wt.% by XRD. Oxalate minerals are likely undetectable by reflectance spectroscopy in bulk materials at expected concentrations, while acetate and formate minerals have relatively low LODs at near-infrared wavelengths due to their sharp and strong absorption bands. Carbonate minerals may show decreasing LODs with increasing grain size in reflectance spectra and have relatively high LODs at near-infrared wavelengths for fine grained powders and relatively low LODs when using the 3950 nm absorption band at all grain sizes. Application of these data to CheMin observations show that my data could accurately detect low concentrations of siderite at nearly the same values determined from previous CheMin data processing within error and within an average of 0.5-1.0 wt.% where siderite was detected. After applying the calibration curves from the other carboxylates, I did not find strong evidence for their detection in any of the CheMin data. Some samples, primarily the Gale crater Rocknest aeolian material may contain some concentration of whewellite which may be consistent with the analysis of the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) data, but detection may be complicated by overlapping plagioclase Bragg peaks. I applied the measured reflectance spectra from 350 to 4000 nm to some data collected by the SuperCam instrument at Jezero crater that were implied to contain organic compounds through analysis of Perseverance Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) data. I did not find evidence for carboxylates in the reflectance spectra except for Mg-rich anhydrous carbonates, and I determined the concentration to be between roughly 5.0 and 20.0 wt.%, which is broadly consistent with the previous analyses of these samples by radiative transfer modelling.Master of Science in Environmental and Social Chang
Adult activities of endangered Oarisma poweshiek butterflies are associated with a soil moisture gradient in tall grass prairie in Manitoba, Canada
No full textAccepted version of manuscriptEndangered in Canada and the United States, the Poweshiek skipperling’s (Oarisma poweshiek (Parker) (Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae)) recovery likely depends on understanding more about its ecology. The characteristics of locations which facilitate various adult activities, such as oviposition and resting, in Manitoba tall grass prairie are unknown. We followed adults in prairie patches to identify locations associated with various behaviours, and subsequently measure vegetative, structural and microclimatic attributes at these microhabitats. Adult skipperlings were observed 34 times resulting in 24 flight tracks and 56 point interactions being recorded. Skipperlings flew almost exclusively in the prairie plant community, with few flights into wetter communities and none in forests. Tracks tended to be tortuous, typical of occupancy in higher-quality habitats. Adult activities appeared to be distributed along a soil moisture gradient: oviposition was associated with the relatively mesic section, resting and/or basking with the drier section, and nectar feeding generally associated with sections throughout the gradient. Adults nectared from a mixture of species during the flight period, consuming nectar from Rudbeckia hirta Linnaeus (Asteraceae) most often. We report previously unknown aspects of O. poweshiek’s ecology. Implications for conservation: Our findings describe how adult skipperlings might use sections of prairie with different soil moistures to lay eggs, rest, bask and consume nectar. We visualise approaches to ensure all sections are disturbed during stewardship activities and evaluate the degree to which all facilitative soil moistures are present in candidate (re)introduction sites, for the successful recovery of O. poweshiek."We appreciate the financial support from Canadian Wildlife Service (facilitated by MC); Nature Conservancy
of Canada; University of Winnipeg; and Wildlife, Fisheries and Resource Enforcement Branch (WW; Government of Manitoba)."https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10841-023-00502-
Documentation on traditional Indigenous Material Culture in Books for Young Readers
No full textThe Six Seasons Project of Asiniskaw Īthiniwak project is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
Structure, Function and Drought Resilience of Northern Prairie Communities, 50 Years After Grazing Disturbance
Get PDFWith climate change threatening the function of grassland ecosystems, conservation and restoration strategies are shifting from comparisons of species compositions with baseline conditions, to assessments of ecosystem functions and resilience. Here, I present research from Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba, to illustrate the links between plant community composition, leaf traits of dominant plants, and grassland community function. I also discuss applications for the management of grassland ecosystems. I use plant community data, collected in 1973, 2010 and 2020, to understand the long-term effects of grazing on the function and resilience of northern fescue prairies. I test whether legacies of historic grazing continue to affect the structure, diversity, and composition of grassland communities, and whether historic grazing predicted community leaf trait composition in fescue grassland ecosystems. I also explore how nutrient and carbon cycling may be influenced by leaf traits of dominant plants, including their leaf carbon and nitrogen concentrations. Fifty years after grazing, heavily grazed prairies continued to have lower plant diversity. However, prairies with light grazing had lower spatial variation in plant composition. By 2020, community leaf trait composition could not be predicted by historic grazing, and instead, plant trait composition was driven by exotic species invasions. Similarity in traits between Poa pratensis and Festuca hallii resulted in a functional redundancy between lightly and heavily grazed grasslands. Invasions of Poa pratensis increased the values of leaf density, and leaf C:N over the years while Bromus inermis increased the value of specific leaf area (SLA), illustrating that changes in grassland composition correlate with changes in the traits of dominant plants that have the potential to affect the resilience of grasslands to drought as well as their function. This study describes how community trait composition can impact grassland drought tolerance and ecosystem functions, and the management implications of those consequences.Master of Science in Bioscience, Technology, and Public Polic
Rare words in text summarization
Get PDFAutomatic text summarization is a difficult task, which involves a good understanding of an input text to produce fluent, brief and vast summary. The usage of text summarization models can vary from legal document summarization to news summarization. The model should be able to understand where important information is located to produce a good summary. However, infrequently used or rare words might limit model’s understanding of an input text, as the model might ignore such words or put less attention on them. Another issue is that the model accepts only a limited amount of tokens (words) of an input text, which might contain redundant information or not including important information as it is located further in the text. To address the problem of rare words, we have proposed a modification to the attention mechanism of the transformer model with pointer-generator layer, where attention mechanism receives frequency information for each word, which helps to boost rare words. Additionally, our proposed supervised learning model uses the hybrid approach incorporating both extractive and abstractive elements, to include more important information for the abstractive model in a news summarization task. We have designed experiments involving a combination of six different hybrid models with varying input text sizes (measured as tokens) to test our proposed model. Four wellknown datasets specific to news articles were used in this work: CNN/DM, XSum, Gigaword and DUC 2004 Task 1. Our results were compared using the well-known ROUGE metric. Our best model achieved R-1 score of 38.22, R-2 score of 15.07 and R-L score of 35.79, outperforming three existing models by several ROUGE points.Master of Science in Applied Computer Scienc
The presentation of self in the digital age: Experiences of cyberbullying victims and perpetrators
Get PDFVirtual communication has become instrumental in the digital age and it presents advantages and risks, including cyberbullying, in the lives of young people. Drawing on Goffman’s (1959) concept of the presentation of self – the study of how the self assumes different roles and behaviours depending on social circumstances – I explore how young people with the lived experiences of cyberbullying engage in the presentation of their virtual and non-virtual selves and how they cope with the consequences of cyberbullying. Using a phenomenological framework for inquiry, the results of this study derive from qualitative interviews and participant-generated visual data. The results of this study suggest that there is no binary identity of a cyber-victim or cyber-perpetrator, and participants’ chosen identity shapes their presentation of self both in virtual and non-virtual settings as a way of coping and/or maintaining their status and appearance. Cyberbullying victimization is a form of online victimization, whereby the former form of victimization can produce digital harm and social inequalities due to the lack of emotional, affective, and mental health support offered to the victims of online bullying. With the recommendations for future research, this study advocates for creating spaces to offer mental health support to young people who experience cyberbullying victimization. Contributing to the growing field of digital criminology, the results of this thesis also suggest that the experience of cyberbullying normalizes the practice of online bullying among young people and shapes their understanding of online communication, victimization, and transgression in the digital age.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).Master of Arts in Criminal Justic
Cryptographic Techniques for Data Privacy in Digital Forensics
Get PDFThe acquisition and analysis of data in digital forensics raise different data privacy challenges. Many existing works on digital forensic readiness discuss what information should be stored and how to collect relevant data to facilitate investigations. However, the cost of this readiness often directly impacts the privacy of innocent third parties and suspects if the collected information is irrelevant. Approaches that have been suggested for privacy-preserving digital forensics focus on the use of policy, non-cryptography-based, and cryptography-based solutions. Cryptographic techniques have been proposed to address issues of data privacy during data analysis. As the utilization of some of these cryptographic techniques continues to increase, it is important to evaluate their applicability and challenges in relation to digital forensics processes. This study provides digital forensics investigators and researchers with a roadmap to understanding the data privacy challenges in digital forensics and examines the various privacy techniques that can be utilized to tackle these challenges. Specifically, we review the cryptographic techniques applied for privacy protection in digital forensics and categorize them within the context of whether they support trusted third parties, multiple investigators, and multi-keyword searches. We highlight some of the drawbacks of utilizing cryptography-based methods in privacy-preserving digital forensics and suggest potential solutions to the identified shortcomings. In addition, we propose a conceptual privacy-preserving digital forensics (PPDF) model that is based on the use of cryptographic techniques and analyze the model within the context of the above-mentioned factors. An evaluation of the model is provided through a consideration of identified factors that may affect an investigation. Lastly, we provide an analysis of how existing principles for preserving privacy in digital forensics are addressed in our PPDF model. Our evaluation shows that the model aligns with many of the existing privacy principles recommended for privacy protection in digital forensics.This work was supported by The University of Winnipeg (Grant ID: 16792)
Rhymes with Truck: The Manitoba Food History Project
Get PDFPreprintThis article provides an overview of the federally funded Manitoba Food History Project, outlining its incorporation of students into the research and publication process and its use of a food truck as a mobile cooking and recording studio. It offers an examination of why other oral historians might—or might not—want their own food history truck."The Manitoba Food History Project is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Our thanks to Diversity Food Services, the University of Winnipeg, and the Oral History Centre for their support."https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00940798.2023.217361