1722 research outputs found
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Egg Laying Behaviour and Larval Shelter-Construction Patterns of the endangered Mottled Duskywing (Erynnis martialis) in Canada
Get PDFThe Mottled duskywing (Erynnis martialis) butterfly is endangered, living in pine forests and oak barrens in Canada and the eastern United States of America. While host plants and larval behaviour is documented in Mottled duskywing’s eastern range, these life components are poorly known in Manitoba. We observed adult behaviour, host plant species used and larval foraging to better understand these biological aspects of E. martialis. We observed eggs laid exclusively on Ceanothus herbaceus, and larvae consuming C. herbaceus in leaf shelters near the periphery of plants. Early instar larvae tied leaves together with cells of silk creating partly open shelters while later instar larvae completely sealed shelters. Shelters constructed out of young leaves at the edge of plants are likely easier to digest. Later-instar larvae may nocturnally harvest food to consume in shelters during the day to reduce predation risk. Larvae were found in clearings adjacent to Pinus banksiana dominated forests, with these openings likely providing suitable microhabitats for egg development and larval feeding. We observed newly emerged adults during weeks 1 to 5 of the flight period; eggs, larvae and adults overlapped. We recommend direct observations of larval foraging—during the day and night, as well as transitions into and out of diapause—to more accurately describe their behaviour and physiology. We started to characterise microhabitats, however further research is needed. Our research may help to guide critical habitat designations, leading to successful Mottled duskywing recovery in Manitoba."Funding was provided by the Canadian Wildlife Service (Environment and Climate Change Canada, Government of Canada) and an Alliance Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. JH thanks the support for publication fees by the University of Winnipeg Graduate Student Travel / Publication Grant."https://bioone.org/journals/the-journal-of-the-lepidopterists-society/volume-76/issue-1/lepi.76i1.a6/Egg-Laying-Behaviour-and-Larval-Shelter-Construction-Patterns-of-the/10.18473/lepi.76i1.a6.shor
Winnipeg’s Pandemic Response: Supporting Persons at Risk or Experiencing Homelessness
Get PDF"This research project is funded by a Partnership Engage Grant awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) in Partnership with End Homelessness Winnipeg.
Blood-Red Relations in and Out of Place: Women's Self-Harm and Supernatural Crime in the Moth Diaries
Get PDFSubmitted version of manuscript. The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in American Review of Canadian Studies, 2022.In Canadian filmmaker Mary Harron’s The Moth Diaries (a Canadian/American/Irish co-production), exploring adolescent girls’ friendships and self-harm in a boarding school setting, blood is out of place. It drips from the protagonist’s father’s wrist artery, willingly shed in suicide; involuntarily tarnishes her nightgown as menstrual blood; falls on the school director’s china figurines as nosebleed; and pours in the school library as a vampire-invoked rain. Moth uses blood to manifest the suicide contagion that Rebecca fears she has inherited from her artist father. Blood also signifies her resistance and recovery, enabled by her difficult relationship with her schoolmates, erstwhile best friend Lucy, and vampire Ernessa. Blood functions as a material marker of transition from girls’ childhood relationships that mainstream Anglo-American films often render passive and vulnerable, and marks same-sex attractions of different types of friendship and love. It symbolizes and draws attention to harms and crimes in interpersonal violence, paternal abandonment, and self-damage. Our focus on relationships between so called “blood kin” and the idea of blood relations weaves into our discussion of female agency, woman identification, and queer affinities through Moth’s out-of-place ontologies for blood as not only conventionally abject, but also a sacralized substance and symbol.This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Insight Grant 435-2016-1078, “Frozen Justice: a century of crime in Canadian film” (Steven Kohm, PI).Taylor & Francis Grou
Community-anchored assessment of Indigenous second language learning in K-12 schools
Get PDFIndigenous second language programs in K-12 schools contribute to culturally nourishing education and to the revitalization of Indigenous languages. Assessing Indigenous second language learning presents particular opportunities and challenges based on the linguistic, historical, political, cultural, and social contexts in and for which the Indigenous language is being taught and learned. The self-governing Inuit region of Nunatsiavut is concerned with developing effective and appropriate tools for assessing students’ Inuttitut in order to evaluate how well K-12 programs are working so far, identify the basis on which future K-12 Inuttitut curriculum may be developed, and support ongoing assessment of learning and for learning in Inuttitut classrooms. This article discusses ways in which Inuit teachers in Nunatsiavut and a curriculum evaluation team have developed and implemented assessment tools and practices to evaluate Inuttitut learning in Nunatsiavut area K-12 schools. We discuss how Indigenous language learning and assessment, even when it occurs as part of an official school program, can be anchored in families and community. Families and communities need to be part of establishing language learning goals. Inuit teachers are drawing in full community resources and building a community of practice including Elders, other language speakers, leaders, principals, and teachers, to support and create contexts for community-anchored Inuttitut learning and assessment.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2022.73304
Rough-set based learning methods: A case study to assess the relationship between the clinical delivery of cannabinoid medicine for anxiety, depression, sleep, patterns and predictability
Get PDFCOVID-19 is an unprecedented health crisis causing a great deal of stress and mental health challenges in populations in Canada. Recently, research is emerging highlighting the potential of cannabinoids’ beneficial effects related to anxiety, mood, and sleep disorders as well as pointing to an increased use of medicinal cannabis since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. Furthermore, evidence points to a correlation between mental health and sleep patterns. The objective of this research is threefold: i) to assess the relationship of the clinical delivery of cannabinoid medicine, by utilizing machine learning, to anxiety, depression and sleep scores; ii) to discover patterns based on patient features such as specific cannabis recommendations, diagnosis information, decreasing/increasing levels of clinical assessment tools (GAD7, PHQ9 and PSQI) scores over a period of time (including during the COVID timeline); and iii) to predict whether new patients could potentially experience either an increase or decrease in clinical assessment tool scores. The dataset for this thesis was derived from patient visits to Ekosi Health Centres in Manitoba, Canada and Ontario, Canada from January, 2019 to April, 2021. Extensive pre-processing and feature engineering was performed. To determine the outcome of a patients treatment, a class feature (Worse, Better, or No Change) indicative of their progress or lack thereof due to the treatment received was introduced. Three well-known supervised machine learning models (tree-based, rule-based and nearest neighbour) were trained on the patient dataset. In addition, seven rough and rough-fuzzy hybrid methods were also trained on the same dataset. All experiments were conducted using a 10-fold CV method. Sensitivity and specificity measures were higher in all classes with rough and rough-fuzzy hybrid methods. The highest accuracy of 99.15% was obtained using the rule-based rough-set learning method.Ekosi Health Center, MitacsMaster of Science in Applied Computer Scienc
This is Us: Latent Profile Analysis of Canadian Teachers’ Burnout during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Get PDFDuring the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, 1,930 Canadian teachers were surveyed about their burnout and resilience levels, as well as their job demands and resources. Latent profile analysis revealed that teachers were responding to their experiences in five distinct patterns, or profiles, of burnout or resilience. Survey data were then used to match each profile group with their salient demands and resources. A continuum model of recommendations is offered to support teacher resilience as they navigate and recover from the pandemic. / Au cours de la vague initiale de la pandémie de COVID-19, 1 930 enseignants canadiens ont été interrogés sur leur degré d’épuisement professionnel et de résilience, ainsi que sur les exigences liées au travail et leurs ressources. L’analyse des profils latents a révélé que les enseignants réagissaient à ces situations selon cinq modèles ou profils distincts d’épuisement ou de résilience. Les données de l’enquête ont ensuite été utilisées pour faire correspondre chaque groupe de profils aux exigences de travail et ressources principales déclarées. Un modèle de continuum de recommandations est proposé pour soutenir la résilience des enseignants alors qu’ils traversent et se remettent de la pandémie.https://cje-rce.ca/journals/volume-45-issue-2/teacher-burnout-during-covid19
Differences in ebullitive methane release from small, shallow ponds present challenges for scaling
Get PDFSmall, shallow waterbodies are potentially important sites of greenhouse gas release to the atmosphere. The role of ebullition may be enhanced here relative to larger and deeper systems, due to their shallow water, but these features remain relatively infrequently studied in comparison to larger systems.Herein,we quantify ebullitive release ofmethane (CH4) in small shallow ponds in three regions of North America and investigate the role of potential drivers. Shallow ponds exhibited open-water season ebullitive CH4 release rates as high as 40 mmol m–2 d–1, higher than previously reported for similar systems. Ebullitive release of CH4 varied by four orders of magnitude across our 15 study sites, with differences in flux rates both within and between regions. What is less clear are the drivers responsible for these differences. There were few relationships between open water–season ebullitive flux and physicochemical characteristics, including organic matter, temperature, and sulphate. Temperature was only weakly related to ebullitive CH4 release across the studywhen considering all observation intervals. Only four individual sites exhibited significant relationships between temperature and ebullitive CH4 release. Other sites were unresponsive to temperature, and region-specific factors may play a role. There is some evidence that where surface water sulphate concentrations are high, CH4 production and release may be suppressed. Missouri sites (n = 5) had characteristically low ebullitive CH4 release; here bioturbation could be important. While this work greatly expands the number of open-water season ebullition rates for small and shallow ponds, more research is needed to disentangle the role of different drivers. Further investigation of the potential thresholding behaviour of sulphate as a control on ebullitive CH4 release in lentic systems is one such opportunity. What is clear, however, is that efforts to scale emissions (e.g., as a function of temperature) must be undertaken with caution."Fieldwork at US and GHG analyses for the project were funded through an NSERC-DG awarded to CJW. Fieldwork and analysis at UW were funded through an NSERC-DG awarded to NJC. Fieldwork and nutrient analysis atMUwere funded by the Prairie Fork Charitable Endowment Trust to RLN."https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972104760
Endangered Oarisma poweshiek larvae vary their graminoid forage in Manitoba, Canada
Get PDFThe Poweshiek skipperling (Oarisma poweshiek) is endemic to the tall grass prairie in North America and is now critically endangered globally. Existing populations are scattered among tall grass prairie remnants. However, the host food plants eaten by Poweshiek skipperling larvae, the vegetative and microclimatic descriptions of immature and adult microhabitats, and O. poweshiek behaviour in Manitoba are unknown. We followed Poweshiek skipperling adults in their natural habitat to locate microhabitats where eggs were laid and to observe larval foraging behaviour and development. We measured vegetative, structural, and microclimatic characteristics of microhabitats used by immatures and documented the host species larvae consumed, their general behaviour (on plants; movement within microhabitats), and their developmental schedules. Larvae ate Andropogon gerardi, Muhlenbergia richardsonis, Sporobolus heterolepis, and Schizachyrium scoparium (all Poaceae) in natural tall grass prairie. Larvae appeared to navigate microhabitats to locate host food plants, alternating between shoots of various species throughout their development. Microhabitats seemed to be more open, with drier microclimates, than areas where eggs were not laid. This improved understanding of larval feeding patterns, adult behaviours, and microhabitat attributes may help local grassland stewards and researchers reduce the list of possible causes of decline and identify potential solutions to recover the Poweshiek skipperling."Financial support was provided by the Canadian Wildlife Service (facilitated by M.C.), the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the University of Winnipeg, and Wildlife, Fisheries and Resource Enforcement Branch, Government of Manitoba (W.W.) and is much appreciated."https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/9A3C308673F7CC950FE5875879253A66/S0008347X22000347a.pdf
Children’s acquisition of literacy in syllabic scripts
Get PDFThis paper, emerging from questions from teachers, parents, and educational policy makers in Canadian Inuit communities, summarizes the results of a literature review of English-language sources addressing children’s acquisition of literacy in syllabic scripts. Specifically, how first language literacy development in Inuktitut syllabics (Qaniujaaqpait) and English or French roman orthography (Qaliujaaqpait) differ (Harper, 2005), together with how learning two different scripts impacts biliteracy acquisition in Inuit children, including those with learning exceptionalities. Unsurprisingly, there are few salient English-language empirical studies, albeit Gleitman and Rozin (1973) demonstrated English-speaking children’s ease in acquiring a 23-symbol English-based syllabary, proposing that syllabaries are a more concrete and effective starting point for early literacy. Limited research concerning Cherokee suggests that syllabics are not objectively harder to learn for mother tongue speakers, but that language loss, alongside ideologies privileging alphabetic writing, may compel preferential use of alphabetic systems for teaching Cherokee literacy (e.g. Peter & Hirata-Edds, 2009). First language literacy acquisition in syllabics is more broadly studied in Asian languages, whereby linguistic awareness (phonemes, syllables, lexemes) was the strongest predictor of learners’ success (cf. Nag & Snowling, 2012). The research suggests that greater understanding of processes and practices supporting children’s acquisition of literacy and biliteracy in syllabics is needed. Still, efforts to strengthen Inuktut oral language proficiency and use, and to enhance overall exposure to and opportunities to read a variety of Inuktut texts, will likely have a greater positive impact on children’s acquisition of Inuktut literacy than efforts to change the script being used.
This research was completed with funding from the University of Winnipeg Research Office - Covid Discretionary Grant.University of Winnipeg Research Offic
Stratfordian Epistemology and the Ethics of Belief
Get PDFPre-publication proof.This article considers belief in the traditional biography of Shakespeare -- that he was the "man from Stratford" -- in terms of belief ethics, to determine whether or not it is ethical and praiseworthy, or unethical and blameworthy.https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/the-oxfordian