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How Does Coworker Job Crafting Affect Teammate Job Outcomes?
Get PDFJob crafting, the proactive changing of job demands and resources to better suit one’s needs and abilities, is on the rise within the modern workplace as individuals are experiencing greater autonomy and ownership over their careers. Research shows that job crafting is not only associated with increased employee job satisfaction, well-being, and work engagement, but also improves employee adaptability to change. In addition to current labour shortages, organizations need also to adapt to increasingly challenging and unpredictable work environments. Organizations therefore stand to benefit from the outcomes of individual job crafting. While limited research has shown some possible spillover benefits for teammates, recent research has revealed possible negative consequences of this self-targeted activity on the job crafter’s teammates, specifically because job crafting involves modifying tasks and relationships. In a collaborative environment, these changes risk negatively impacting teammates. The purpose of this study was therefore to examine whether coworker job crafting influences teammate job satisfaction and job stress in an interdependent work context. The results from a survey of 199 panel participants in Canada, USA, and the UK unexpectedly supported improved job satisfaction and reduced stress for teammates of coworkers who job craft. The data also supported the role of coworker social support as a mechanism by which coworker job crafting influenced teammate outcomes. These findings suggest that the effects that individual job crafting have on teammates depends on the work context. The theoretical implication indicates the importance of continued study of the effects of job crafting on others
Design and Implementation of Machine Learning Models and Algorithms for Flood, Drought and Frazil Prediction
Get PDFNatural calamities like floods and droughts pose a significant threat to humanity, impacting millions of people each year and incurring substantial economic losses to society. In response to this challenge, this thesis focuses on developing advanced machine learning techniques to improve water height prediction accuracy that can aid municipalities in effective flood mitigation.
The primary objective of this study is to evaluate an innovative architecture that leverages Long Short Term Networks - neural networks to predict water height accurately in three different environmental scenarios, i.e., frazil, droughts and floods due to snow spring melt. A distinguishing feature of our approach is the incorporation of meteorological forecast as an input parameter into the prediction model. By modeling the intricate relationships between water level data, historical meteorological data and meteorological forecasts, we seek to evaluate the impact of meteorological forecasts and if any inaccuracies could impact water-level prediction. We compare the outcomes obtained by incorporating next-hour, next-day and next-week meteorological data into our novel LSTM model. Our results indicate a comprehensive comparison of the usage of various parameters as input and our findings suggest that accurate weather forecasts are crucial in achieving reliable water height predictions.
Additionally, this study focuses on the utilization of IoT sensor data in combination with ML models to enhance the effectiveness of flood prediction and management. We present an online machine learning approach that performs online training of the model using real-time data from IoT sensors. The integration of live sensor data provides a dynamic and adaptive system that demonstrates superior predictive capabilities compared to traditional static models. By adopting these advanced techniques, we can mitigate the adverse impacts of natural catastrophes and work towards building more resilient and disaster-resistant communities
The Double Stigma Challenge: How Blocklisted Colleges from Montreal are Surviving After Fraud Accusations in 2020
Get PDFThis study investigates how organizations overcome stigmatization attributed to their disapproved activities and amplified by negative events. Through a comparative case study of two out of ten sanctioned colleges in Montreal, and, by comparing the ongoing trajectories of both these colleges in managing their stigmas, I’ve investigated the strategies they adopted in response to their main audiences in order to survive. Using various data sources, including press articles, government publications, public company information, and interviews, this study shows that colleges followed different strategies according to their stigma intensity. The college with high stigmatization intensity followed a stigma containment strategy, focusing on actions to strengthen relationships with their allies, the students and partner-employers, creating a virtuous cycle within this group. The college with low stigmatization intensity followed a destigmatization strategy, focusing on collective action with other colleges through the provincial and national private college associations. This was achieved by actions that were mainly political, aiming to change the stigmatizer's perspective, the government, in their favor. This work contributes to the literature on organizational stigma, as well as discussions on legitimacy and reputation. It explores how different intensities of stigmas demand different strategies for similar institutions and proposes understanding how core and event stigmas interact, intensifying or reducing each other. The study also contributes to managerial practice by explicating strategies that stigmatized organizations can use
The Application of Machine Learning-Based Prediction Models for Cardiometabolic Risk Among a Representative US Adult Population: A Cross-Sectional Study of NHANES 1999-2006
Get PDFIntroduction: Common measures of adiposity (such as body mass index) are only proxies. In contrast, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) is more precise to measure body composition. Therefore, this thesis utilized an unsupervised machine learning technique to group individuals based on similarities in their fat and muscle mass body-composition from DXA. Associations between the newly developed body-composition phenotypes with cardiometabolic risks were compared to phenotypes using a median split.
Methods: Data were collected from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES: 1999-2006 cycles, n=5,566; split into 70/30% training and test datasets), a representative U.S. population. The K-means cluster phenotypes based on partitioning observations from deciles of fat-mass and muscle-mass adjusted for age and sex were identified. Model fit was assessed using the silhouette and elbow method. Performance of logistic regression models to identify unfavorable cardiometabolic risks using either the K-means or the 50th percentile cut-off phenotypes was assessed with the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC-AUC). Analyses were performed separately for males and females and incorporated weighting and the complex sampling design.
Results: Optimal models were 2-means and 4-means k-clusters. ROC-AUCs from 2-means cluster models to identify cardiometabolic risk factors had the lowest predictive power (0.52 to 0.63). The ROC-AUCs from 50th percentile cut-off phenotypes and 4-means cluster phenotypes were higher (0.56-0.66, 0.57-0.67, respectively).
Discussion: Although the 4-means clustering was superior to the 50th percentile cut-off in predicting cardiometabolic risk, the ROC-AUCs were generally poor. Future work should investigate whether performing K-means clustering for each specific age improves their prediction
On-Premise Service Bundling and E-commerce Service Bundling: Implications for Warehouse Club Foot Traffic
Get PDFThis study delves into the impact of on-premise and e-commerce service bundling strategies on foot traffic within warehouse clubs in the fiercely competitive US grocery retail sector. The on-premise service bundle incorporates services such as optometry, pharmacy, fuel stations, and tire centers, while e-commerce service bundle includes standard delivery, omnichannel pickup, and platform delivery options. The focus of our research is to investigate how these service bundling strategies can effectively retain customers and sustain the physical presence of warehouse clubs. We postulate that enhancing on-premise service bundling can lessen the unfavorable correlation between e-commerce service bundling and physical store traffic.
Our research unveils a favorable connection between on-premise service bundling and customer visits, contrasting with an inverse correlation between amplified e-commerce service offerings and foot traffic. Intriguingly, this downward trajectory can be offset by strategically incorporating on-premise service offerings. However, the influence of these services fluctuates across on-premise service categories (such as healthcare and automotive) and e-commerce service categories (such as standard delivery, omni-pickup, and platform delivery). Additionally, these effects vary based on the geographical proximity of households (classified as less than 5 miles, 5-10 miles, 10-30 miles, 30-50 miles, and beyond 50 miles). These results underscore the strategic need for a harmonious mix of on-premise and e-commerce service offerings to uphold and augment foot traffic within warehouse clubs.
In conclusion, the adoption of a balanced and strategic approach to service bundling not only allows warehouse clubs to meet their customers' needs more effectively, but also safeguards their brick-and-mortar presence. By fine-tuning the combination of on-premise and e-commerce service offerings, warehouse clubs can better adapt to evolving consumer preferences, maintain their competitive edge, and potentially increase foot traffic. This comprehensive approach not only bolsters customer engagement but also ensures resilience in a rapidly changing retail landscape. Our findings, thus, contribute to the advancement of theoretical understanding in multi-channel retail strategies, and present actionable insights for practical implementation within the retail industry, ultimately supporting sustained growth and profitability for warehouse clubs in the face of increasing competition.
Key words: warehouse club industry, on-premise service, e-commerce service, consumer foot traffi
Time and Phonology: Precedence-Based Representations
Get PDFA major factor hindering the establishment of a successful neuroscience of phonology centers around the biological viability of a given phonological framework. The ultimate aim of this project is to find potential alignments between linguistics and neuroscience. In this vein, the main topic of the thesis rests upon establishing the minimal complexity requirements for a phonological representation that is biologically plausible, cognitively sound, and empirically motivated. Heeding Minimalist proposals (Chomsky, 1995) that encourage efficiency in computation and economy in representation, I embark on an in-depth exploration of the parameters of cognition that are necessary and sufficient in a phonological representation while discounting the processes and parameters that can be said to be “domain-general”. To that end, I take seriously Ernst Po ̈ppel’s (2004) exhortation to consider the role of temporal events like linear order and precedence in the study of cognitive systems like phonology by surveying the literature on time perception. The conclusions support a separation of order from phonological representations, extending the scope of substance-freeness (Hale and Reiss, 2000) by characterizing order as substance. Such an approach can contribute to thoroughly defining the object of study and offer insight that narrows the search space for potential bridges
A Philosophy of Movement: Compositionality and Compossesssions of a Choreography of the Event, Environmental Bodyings, and its Pedagogies On Thought Experienced, Movement Moving and the Feeling of the Unfelt
Get PDFThis research-creation thesis is a improvisation of thought, in that sense, it proposes a writing practice as a dance and choreographic endeavour, in the way that it is made as if making a choreography, in that way it is a choreographic text. It tries desperately to pull aways and de-center dance from the dance studio and a body that continually moves in a space toward a pull that calls a different way of envisioning movement not necessarily only in a body but in-bodyings, and also not only in-constant-movement but also in non-movement and non-location. It also desperately wills to break free from the concept of separated entities and perception located in a human brain-body-mind, in order to move with a more intuitive concept of compositionality and environmentality and to craft practices to move from there. Thus, moving with a childish obsession of always feeling and wanting and needing one thing being another and another and another in potential. The obsession carries the hiccup of the phrase: A text can be a painting, a dance can be a sculpture, a choreography can be the making of an egg.
This research-creation thesis elbows itself with a philosophy of organism or process philosophy, meaning that it improvises, dances in thought, and writes with philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and it is more an ode to thought rather than a descriptive or explanatory text. It is not about, nor it explains anything. It seeks itself as a creative gesture. It produces zones of relevance from flash thoughts and moves from there into the unknown proliferations, repetitions, or insistences, from a dance oriented qualitative environment of thought. It seeks to craft itself with the qualities of the sculptoric, painting, storytelling, architectal, and the pedagogical in its movements; in such way, seeking a transversal relationality, rather than a locality of fields. It won’t fit in pre-demarcated fields, instead, it greets and invents fields anew for an attempt toward the creation of new possible worlds of potential with the appetite of an artful way of living as an imperative urgent task of the world that announces itself as necessary as it unfolded at the turn of 2019 and into the 2020’s with the pains of the pandemic.
It works with the concept of an occasion of experience from Whitehead, departing from the chant: the world is activity and thought is in the world. Like that, it stays close to such chant and builds its own invented quasi-concepts: compositionality, compossessions, and environmentalities. It also invents the term Machines for Feeling and moves with such intensive conceptual fielding. It tries over and over, to move from inter-actions toward infra-actions.
Hopefully it is an intensive work that dives into a profoundity under-the-sea-like, that keeps on digging toward infra-activities of mental-actual or non-actual actual worlds' dances in the making. It inclines in a small ledge of felt thought of the virtual in the actual and the actual potential in the virtual. Like that, it moves into conceptual architectures made from a delicate choreography of conceptual forces through a written languaging texture.
Its desire is to build enough consistency for a conceptual launchpad as a relational platform in order to be able to jump into a very wanted text on pedagogies and choreographic modes found again and again in what the author calls The Diagram Game.
It moves with the figures of forgetting, starting again, unfinishing, diagrammatic walking, bread-crumbing, interrupting, loosing, tripping, mundane everyday life, friends, living room, kitchen and shower dances, slownesses and speeds, non-movement, movement, discontinuities, pain and joy. It was written and re-written and has many friend-texts that evented in the lapse of 9 years (2014-2023). It bows itself toward the patience of all the co-conspirators that accompanied the multiple processes it navigated with.
It thinks-feels itself as an energetics for pedagogies and worlds to come
Buckling Behaviour Improvement of Steel Plate Shear Walls with and without Openings
Get PDFSteel plate shear wall (SPSW) is an effective lateral load-resisting system rapidly gaining the attention of many researchers and structural engineers. The system is designed and constructed primarily in seismically active regions. Conventional SPSW uses thin unstiffened steel infill plates, which act as the main ductile fuse of the lateral load-resisting system. It is often required to have openings in the infill plate. One of the main reasons for having an opening in the infill plate is to provide a place for nonstructural elements such as windows or doors. However, when subjected to lateral loads, deformations around the openings are a concern that must be considered. The main objective of this study is to prevent the out-of-plane deformation of the openings and find a practical and efficient solution for this issue. A recognized method commonly used to prevent the buckling of thin steel plate shear walls is attaching stiffeners on the infill plate. Thus, using stiffeners around the opening is the main consideration as a solution for the addressed issue. Commonly used stiffened plates are extensively stiffened and have a relatively large number of stiffeners. This can make the stiffened SPSW system quite expensive and unpopular. This study aims to prevent the deformation of the openings by using as few stiffeners as possible.
In the first part of this research work, the behaviour of stiffened steel plate shear walls is studied analytically and numerically. The analytical study is done by the plate-frame interaction (PFI) model, and the numerical analysis is done using ABAQUS. The analytical study shows that stiffeners in the stiffened infill plate can increase elastic stiffness by 53% and the shear strength by about 15%. A series of SPSW models with horizontal and vertical stiffeners are analyzed, and their buckling behaviour is studied. A close agreement between the PFI method and the finite element analysis is observed. Based on the analysis, an improved stiffness criterion for designing stiffeners in stiffened SPSWs is proposed. FE analysis shows that the proposed stiffness criterion is effective in preventing the global buckling of the stiffened infill plates in SPSWs
In the second part, SPSWs with a rectangular opening are studied using finite element analysis. The results for unstiffened plates show very large deformations around the opening. Different stiffener layouts to prevent deformations are considered and analyzed. The results show that all considered layouts are effective in preventing the deformation around the opening. Based on the analysis, an effective stiffener layout is selected. FE analysis shows that the proposed stiffener layout can improve the behaviour of SPSWs with rectangular openings. FE models with different opening locations and sizes are also analyzed. Analysis shows that the shear strength of the stiffened infill plate depends only on the length of the rectangular opening. It is also observed that the location of the rectangular opening does not have any significant effect on the strength of the infill plate. Finally, a shear strength equation is proposed for the infill plate stiffened with the proposed stiffener layout around the rectangular opening.
In the last part, two one-third-scale single-storey SPSWs are tested. The specimens have a rectangular opening at the center of the plate, and the openings are reinforced using the proposed stiffener layout. The two specimens are identical in size, and the only difference between the specimens is the size of the opening. Cyclic quasi-static loading is applied at the top of the specimens. Various instruments are used to monitor the behaviour of the specimens during the experiment. Both tests show that deformations around the opening are successfully restrained. Test results also show stable hysteresis curves and good energy dissipation capacity for both specimens. In the end, a 4-storey finite element model with a large rectangular opening is selected, and seismic analysis is performed on the model with and without stiffeners. Eleven historical records are selected and scaled for the seismic analysis. Seismic analysis shows that the proposed stiffener layout around the opening can prevent out-of-plane deformation around the opening in the SPSW system
Cloud Theory
No full textCloud Theory presents a critical, intimate study of post-MeToo masculinity in the form of a novel. Dr. Eli Sabaktani, professor of Speculative History and Myth at Osiris University, finds the diary of Johnny Gray, one of his graduate students, who has recently been called a “known abuser” online. Seeking to understand and redress harm, Eli publishes the diary, not without first gracing its pages with an impassioned preface and copious annotations that flesh out the story’s historical, mythological, and philosophical underpinnings while revealing Eli’s own gender trouble. Johnny’s diary tells the story of a group of friends who attempt to operate a queer-feminist community space in Montréal. Johnny questions his own position and authority within the group, elaborating a “cloud theory” that would replace the rigid impassivity of normative masculinity with a more fluid and cloud-like vulnerability. How might we loosen or “liquefy” the subjective, political, and economic categories that bind, limit, and oppress us, without completely undoing the psychic and social boundaries that nourish and protect us? How to create a safe space that is yet still porous? Johnny attempts to put his ideas into practice, but tensions rise as the group navigates the ensuing COVID pandemic, the protests following the murder of George Floyd, and finally the callout leveled against Johnny that derails the project and sends him into a crisis. Johnny finds momentary reprieve in email exchanges with Eli where they discuss masculinity, shame, power, and perfection, until Eli’s lectures drive him to seek a more pragmatic and compassionate resolution to his story. Cloud Theory seeks to understand the workings of structural power, how it seeps into the body and pries open even our most intimate relationships. Storytelling as methodology allows for a more agile mapping of these liquid dynamics, inflected as they are by personal histories fraught with trauma and shame. In the contested cracks between identity, affect, and power, Cloud Theory attempts to rethink what a male body is, what it can do, and what it might become
Covid-19 and Multiple Job Holding in Canada
Get PDFMultiple job holding can be stimulated for various reasons, from financial difficulties to interest in a different career. Remote working, a newly dominant phenomenon in the working environment, can be a driving force for multiple job holding. This paper investigates how pandemic and remote working affects the decision to moonlight during and after the Covid-19 pandemic in Canada using data from the Labor Force Survey of Canada between 2007 and 2022. The findings suggest that, in general, the probability of taking a second job and hours spent in that have not increased during the pandemic and post-pandemic