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Peel Pack Planning Using Clustering and Decomposition Approach
Get PDFIn order to improve the operational efficiency in the Operating Room, hospitals customize surgical trays for each surgical procedure. Since, surgical procedures involve a variety of patients and surgeons, the usage of surgical instruments (in terms of quantity) differs from case to case. This poses a significant challenge as the variability in instrument usage makes it difficult to determine the optimal quantity for each instrument for each procedure. In this study, we address the issue of excessive waste in surgical trays by proposing the implementation of custom peel packs. These peel packs could be used (in place of a new surgical tray) if the surgical tray ran out of the instruments. Our objective is to reduce waste by designing custom peel packs associated with multiple surgical procedures while ensuring that all the necessary instruments are available during the procedure without opening a new main tray. We present one decomposition approach to finding the exact solution and a simplified fast approach based on clustering and mathematical programming to find the near-optimal solution in a fractional time compared to the exact approach. Numerical experiments demonstrate the performance of the presented approaches. The findings indicate that the proposed K-means based clustering method is very effective in configuring peel packs
Diffracting Artistic Intervention: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Creative Process in Art Education
Get PDFPedagogical possibilities for teaching and learning are uncovered through a propositional approach to inquiry that entangles recent findings in the neuroscience of creativity research with arts-based theory and practice. The transdisciplinary potential for creative dispositions to inform education and mobilize knowledge in new ways makes emergent findings regarding creativity- priming important for art educators. This research diffractively investigates the artistic experience of two arts-related groups engaging in creative activities, particularly those involving the planning, design, and artistic communication of ideas, to examine metacognition of the interoceptive (mindfulness) and exteroceptive (priming) influences asserted in the neuroscience of creativity. Assemblages of data are diffracted and read-through one another to illuminate congruences in the lived experience and creative processes of student artists, art educators, and artist-scientists, leading to transdisciplinary pedagogies and ecologies of practice
Characterization and Prediction of Fluvial Bank Retreat Using Novel Physical Experiments
Get PDFUnderstanding sediment transport and bank erosion in rivers has been a key area of active research for many decades. This research project uses a unique new Outdoor Experimental River Facility (OERF) located at the Université de Sherbrooke to run novel experiments to further our fundamental understanding of fluvial bank retreat processes. The experimental river is unique in that its floodplain is considerably larger (50 m by 20 m) than standard laboratory facilities and allows for the channel to freely migrate laterally instead of being constrained by laboratory walls. Three stages of progressively larger upstream disturbances consisting of sandbag perturbations were added to a straight gravel-bed channel to determine if any morphological changes occurred. Using an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV), water velocity was measured to quantify the flow field and calculate bank and bed shear stress for four experimental phases: 1) no disturbance, 2) small, 3) medium and 4) large sandbag perturbations. Drone photogrammetry was used to generate digital elevation models (DEMs) to visualize erosion and deposition. Bank shear stress measurements were variable, and more research is needed to determine the optimal sampling techniques. Overall, no meander formation occurred during the experiment, which can be attributed to variables such as river armouring, lack of sediment input, and the time frame of the experiment. This study helps provide an increased understanding of bank erosion which will be useful for future bank stabilization projects related to meandering rivers in Quebec, and globally around the world
Perceived Approval of Risky Drinking in Undergraduate Students: Measurement Development and Testing the Association with Problematic Alcohol Use
Get PDFUndergraduate students engage in risky alcohol use; this includes heavy drinking and drinking that leads to problems. The theory of planned behaviour and reasoned action approach identify injunctive norms – perceived approval of drinking behaviour – as central in predicting risky drinking. However, research linking injunctive norms and risky drinking has provided mixed support, thereby contributing to a possible under-utilization of injunctive norms in interventions. The unclear association of injunctive norms and risky drinking may be a result of extensive variability in the operationalization of injunctive norms and the utilization of injunctive norms measures that have poor psychometric properties. The first aim of this research is to improve the measurement of injunctive norms via the development of an injunctive norms measure in undergraduates. The second aim is to utilize this measure to investigate the social anxiety risk pathway to alcohol-related problems in undergraduates. In the first study, using best practices in scale construction, we developed and validated the Perceived Approval of Risky Drinking Inventory (PARDI), which assesses perceived friend, parent, and typical student approval of four risky drinking domains: heavy drinking, drinking-related problems, coping-related drinking, and sexual-risk taking. Psychometric evaluation indicated satisfactory scale score and composite reliability, support for convergent validity, and invariance across gender and drinking status. Utilization of the PARDI may allow researchers to ask more nuanced questions pertaining to undergraduate risky drinking aetiology. In the second study, we investigated the effect of social anxiety and injunctive norms (perceived friend approval of drinking-related problems) on undergraduate alcohol-related problems. Undergraduates completed assessments of injunctive norms, social anxiety, and alcohol-related problems every four months for one year. Controlling for age and sex, higher participant injunctive norms were positively associated with alcohol-related problems (between-subjects analysis) and when injunctive norms were elevated in comparison to participants’ own means, there was a concurrent elevation in alcohol-related problems (within-subjects analysis). Age, but not sex or social anxiety, moderated the within-person association: within-person injunctive norms was more strongly related to alcohol-related problems as age increased, suggesting that injunctive norms exert an increasing influence on risky drinking as students progress through university
“This House Is An Adobe House:” A History of the Abeyta Family on Ojito del Caballo, 1882 to the present
Get PDFIn 1882 a family of five moved onto a piece of land that would become known as Ojo del Caballo, named after the spring where the family took their horses for water. Today, Barbarita and Joce Abeytia’s great-great-great-great grandchildren can be found picking piñon nuts, feeding horses, and visiting with their tias and tios on the same land their ancestors built the first adobe house on in the late nineteenth century. This thesis demonstrates that the Abeyta family remember and understand the many struggles the family have been forced to undertake to keep this land primarily in terms of property relations and temporality. Each generation of owners has had to deal with at least one instance of the land nearly having been lost, and each of these instances is the result of an encounter with private property relations. These moments are theorized as chronotones, or as instances of colliding temporal logics, where the linear and synchronizing temporality of capital collides with the Abeyta family’s own nonsynchronous temporal terrain. This is achieved primarily through the analysis of oral history interviews and photographs. On a continent beset by increasingly rapid, fragmentary, and often violent change, theirs is a story of rare continuity won through committed, if costly, struggle. Through stories of mysterious human encounters, of struggle in the face of capitalist property relations and incessant accumulation, and of conflicting temporalities, this thesis honors the family’s commitment to their land and to each other
Exploring a moonlighting function of the large subunit of ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase during oxidative stress in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii
Get PDFReactive oxygen species (ROS) are known to oxidize macromolecules, causing them to be non-functional or harmful. When adverse conditions cause the production of ROS to exceed the capacities of antioxidant responses, oxidative stress arises. During stress, RNA granules called chloroplast stress granules form in the chloroplast of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. It is hypothesized that the large subunit of Rubisco, RbcL, has a moonlighting function in oxidative stress tolerance as it localizes to chloroplast stress granules without the small subunit (RbcS), and has an RNA-binding activity that is activated under oxidizing conditions (Uniacke & Zerges, 2008; Yosef et al., 2004). This thesis analyzes multiple RbcL mutants to 1) identify the supramolecular state of RbcL that accumulates during hydrogen peroxide-induced stress tolerance, and 2) characterize whether certain regions of the protein are required for the moonlighting function. My results reveal that it is specifically the RbcL dimer, as well as select mutations in the RNA-binding domain and cysteines, that are involved in this alternate function. I further examine if a correlation exists between enhanced stress tolerance and a Triton X-100 insoluble pool of RbcL. This RbcL subpool was found in four of seven mutants with elevated stress tolerance, partially supporting this hypothesis. I also investigate where this non-Rubisco form of RbcL localizes in the chloroplast. Immunofluorescence microscopy results show RbcL in punctate bodies in mutants that have both excess Triton X-100 insoluble RbcL and elevated stress tolerance. This raises the possibility that RbcL in punctate structures carries out the moonlighting function
The Impact of Environmental, Social, and Governance Factors on the Financial Performance of S&P 500 Listed Firms
Get PDFThis study investigates the impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors on the financial performance of non-financial companies in the S&P 500 Index from 2017 to 2020. The study utilizes ESG data from MSCI IVA, Bloomberg, and KLD; financial data from COMPUSTAT; and clean revenue (CR) data from Corporate Knights. The study is divided into two parts: First, we analyze the relationship between ESG ratings and financial performance as measured by a firm’s Tobin’s Q and return on assets (ROA); next, we employ a mediation analysis to explore the effect of MSCI (IVA) data on the relationship between CR and Tobin’s Q. Our study finds that MSCI IVA has a positive and significant association with Tobin’s Q. Bloomberg ESG Disclosure score is positively and significantly associated with ROA but not with Tobin’s Q. When breaking down the ESG components, CR shows a positive and significant association with Tobin’s Q only. The Bloomberg Performance and KLD Environmental scores are significantly positively related to both Tobin’s Q and ROA. We propose that the lack of a standardized ESG reporting framework for companies and the diverse measurement approaches employed by vendors contribute to the limited correlation among various sets of ESG scores. Furthermore, we observe a significant partial mediation effect, which suggests that MSCI IVA mediates the relationship between CR and Tobin’s Q. To validate our findings, we also conduct a robustness check by replacing CR with the Bloomberg Performance Environmental score, and we find that the results remain consistent
Machine Learning Techniques in Usage-Based Insurance: Use of Telematic Data in Auto Insurance
Get PDFThe development of big data technologies and in-vehicle devices has contributed to the growth of Usage-Based Insurance (UBI) in recent years. These in-vehicle devices, such as GPS and sensors, collect certain variables that can represent the driving behaviour of policyholders. This collected data, called telematic data, consist of several variables that have strong relationship with likelihood of having an accident. Consequently, one can use telematic data to improve risk assessment and personalize car insurance premiums. In this thesis, a synthetic car insurance dataset emulated from a Canadian-based insurance company is used to investigate the use of telematic data in predicting the likelihood of having an accident. More precisely four machine learning techniques—logistic regression, random forests, gradient boosting trees, and feed-forward neural networks—are employed to predict the risk of having an accident. Actuaries often use white box machine learning methods like logistic regression for risk assessment due to their interpretability. However, these method are unable to detect non-linear relationships between variables accurately. Therefore, more
complex machine learning techniques such as random forests, gradient boosting trees, and feed-forward neural networks are used to achieve more accurate risk assessment for accidents.
In addition, two variable importance assessment methods—Shapley decomposition and marginal performance loss upon feature removal—are employed to provide insights into the
feature contributions in the overall predictive performance of the models
"Pity must give way to justice": A Case Study of Cordélia Viau, Emotions, and Capital Punishment in Quebec, 1899
Get PDFThis thesis focuses on the emotional impact capital punishment had on families and communities in Québec during the late nineteenth century by examining the case of Cordélia Viau. On March 10, 1899, in the small town of Sainte-Scholastique, Cordélia Viau was executed alongside her accomplice, Samuel Parslow, for the homicide of her husband, Isidore Poirier, in their house in Saint-Canut. In the month preceding her execution, the Viau family – her parents, three of her sisters, and a brother-in-law – set out to campaign for mercy on behalf of Cordélia. Their efforts were a strategic appeal to the wife of the Governor General, Lady Minto, documented in the archival capital case file. This unusual strategy of appealing to the wife of the Queen’s representative rather than the Governor General demonstrates an understanding of the power of the emotions shared between the women, as mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives. Unfortunately for Cordélia, the emotions they hoped to provoke, such as sympathy, pity, and piety, were not compelling enough to save her life. At the same time, the press covered the case with sensational details. Newspapers such as La Presse, La Patrie, The Montreal Daily Star, and The Gazette sought to provoke emotions in their readers by using stereotypes about women and violent crime, highlighting the shame of murder and hangings, and dissecting the actions of the crowd that gathered to witness the execution. Alongside the private and public emotions raised by the case, early abolition sentiment appeared in articles describing the execution
The Effect of Ibuprofen and a Placebo on Conditioned Pain Modulation Among Varsity Athletes
Get PDFIn the world of athletics, the role of pain is complex. While pain-relieving medications like ibuprofen are commonly used, research on their effects on athletes remains limited in number and quality. Additionally, the influence of the placebo effect in sports remains unclear. Our study aimed to compare the impact of ibuprofen and placebos on conditioned pain modulation in athletes. We conducted a semi-randomized controlled trial involving 60 male and 60 female varsity athletes across ten sports disciplines. Participants underwent two visits and were randomly assigned to one of three groups: ibuprofen, placebo, or control. We assessed subjective pain using a numerical scale before, during, and after a cold pressor test (CPT). Conditioned pain modulation was measured via pain pressure threshold measurements before and after the cold pressor test. We monitored cardiovascular variables during-CPT which may serve as a more objective measure of pain. Surprisingly, neither the ibuprofen nor the placebo led to a significant reduction in pain during the CPT. All athletes experienced heightened pain perception, increased blood pressure, and elevated heart rate during-CPT, followed by a return to baseline post-CPT. All athletes exhibited an improved pain pressure threshold after the CPT, indicating conditioned pain modulation. Male and female athletes experienced the same pain during the CPT, however, when pain was measured a different way, via pressure algometry, males could tolerate more pressure before it became painful. This makes it more complicated to distinguish which sex feels more pain, and sex differences in pain perception require further investigation