21793 research outputs found
Sort by
Laughing in the Face of Stress: A Humour-based Group Drama Therapy Intervention to Improve Resilience for People in High-Stress Situations
Get PDFHumour has been viewed as an adaptive strength and a valuable coping mechanism. Over the past three decades researchers have studied the use of humour as an intervention for dealing with different challenges. The following research paper aims to document the reasoning behind creating a drama therapy intervention that enhances the sense of humour to improve resilience for people in high-stress situations. The theoretical intervention research is based on literature highlighting the need for resilience, especially in stressful situations, the benefits of humour, and its beneficial impact on persons living with extensive stress.
The first two steps from Fraser and Galinsky’s (2010) will be used to complete the intervention’s design. The exercises in the drama therapy intervention are inspired by the 7 Humour Habits Program (7HHP) developed by Paul McGhee (2010). The suggested intervention will focus on key humour habits and skills including establishing a playful attitude, looking for humour in everyday life, laughing more often, laughing at oneself, and, finally, finding humour amid stress
Spontaneous Heroism and the Intersubjective Nature of Sacrificial Selflessness in Merleau-Ponty
Get PDFThis paper argues that there are cases of selfless sacrifice, which I call spontaneous heroism, during which the hero is primarily motivated by moral significations that are perceptually provided to them on a pre-judicative level through the event they are experiencing. Spontaneous heroism is not a result of psychological conditioning or rational deliberation but the hero’s pre-judicative and bodily relation to perceptual motives and significations that engender the course of action that leads them to save others in danger. My argument both draws and contributes to scholarship and interpretation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s texts on heroism and freedom in relation to perception. Most scholars have interpreted his references to heroism in relation to his political thought, but in ways that neglect his interest in the primacy of perception, which informs and leads him to discuss heroic experiences. I push back against this neglect in the literature in order to investigate sacrifice and heroism on the level of perception. I explain that moral significations can arise pre-judicatively if we understand the perception as being affective, linked to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body-schema as intersubjective, and involved with his own understanding of pre-judicative experience which he calls the pre-personal. The way in which I expose these phenomenological concepts to describe modern cases of spontaneous heroism leads back to freedom as a central issue for heroism in Merleau-Ponty’s work. Overall, my work further supports other current research on the phenomenon of moral orientation
"Half-forgotten flowers": Constance Spry and the Modern Interior
Get PDFThis thesis explores the practice of London-based florist Constance Spry (1886–1960), focusing on her interaction with the emerging field of interior decoration. I outline the historical context of flower arrangement in Britain to establish the cultural role of flowers in domestic spaces. Focusing on the 1930s, I put Spry’s popularization of all-white flower arrangements in conversation with white as a modernist cornerstone, in order to interrogate its associations in this period with newness, cleanliness and health. I follow scholars of Sapphic Modernity, queer history, and queer theory in my analysis, which foregrounds themes of nostalgia and temporal dissonance to suggest that Spry’s work has a multi-temporal quality which pertains to a queer experience of modernity. I contest the gendered divisions between art, design, decoration, and floristry in situating Spry as a unique individual in these histories
sex differences in physiological responses after acute electronic cigarette smoking
Get PDFElectronic cigarettes (e-cig), were created as a “safe” new alternative to conventional cigarettes, and as a
smoking cessation tool; however, the efficacy of e-cig as a smoking cessation tool in traditional smokers is
still unclear. There is quite a good number of studies about human physiological responses to e-cigarette use; however, there’s still a lack of information regarding these parameters altogether. Furthermore, there is no
clear data if these parameters respond differently in males and females after acute e-cig smoking. There are studies
which suggest that there is a different physiological response to smoking traditional cigarettes in males and females which are suggestive of cardiovascular complications being more common in male smokers whereas respiratory complications are prone to develop more in female smokers.
My thesis work focused on examining the acute cardio-respiratory physiological responses to e-cig smoking by reviewing the current literature and exploring sex differences in these physiological responses after active e-cig smoking in young healthy male and female adults. Acute e-cig consumption was associated with significant negative impact on human and female e-cig users and respiratory responses were more significant in females compared to males
Smoothed Probabilistic-based Algorithms for Sparse Data with application to Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis
Get PDFHumans are able to express more than 10,000 expressions through 43 facial muscles which makes reading faces a significant human skill and a challenge task for Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. Even though much research work has been proposed for the field of sentiment analysis and emotion recognition, it continues to present considerable challenges. In our research, we focus on providing novel emotion recognition and sentiment analysis solutions where we address data
challenges that occur in different modalities: texts, images, and videos. Considering these different multimedia contents, the analysis of data considers the concurrency nature of words in a collection of documents, visual words or proportional features vectors when considering images and videos. This type of data involves several challenges including sparseness, burstiness, correlated features, and high-dimensionality.
In this dissertation, we propose smoothed probabilistic-based approaches to deal with the aforementioned data challenges. First, we introduce the calculation of the exact Fisher information matrix
of the generalized Dirichlet multinomial. Our proposed approach has been adopted for detecting depression in tweets, dialogue-based emotion recognition, and image-based sentiment analysis. Second, we develop different smoothed solutions for handling sparsity, high dimensionality, and burstiness issues such as smoothed Dirichlet multinomial, smoothed Generalized Dirichlet, smoothed Generalized Dirichlet multinomial (SGDM), Taylor approximation to the SGDM, Latent-based smoothed Beta-Liouville, Smoothed Beta-Liouville Emotion Term model, and Smoothed Scaled Dirichlet Relevance Model. These models are based on smoothing count vectors in a smoothed subset of the whole simplex to deal with the problem of sparseness. Moreover, we incorporate a hierarchical generalized Dirichlet prior for sparse multinomial distributions and a Beta-Liouville Naive
Bayes with vocabulary knowledge. These two techniques build up on Bayesian vocabulary knowledge over large discrete domains represented by subsets of feasible outcomes: “observed” and “unobserved” words. In another research work, we consider a sparse topic model for non-exchangeable correlated data over time and present a new interactive distance dependant IBP compound Dirichlet process. We derive a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler combined with Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and study its performance on sentiment analysis data
Effects of physical activity on the production of disturbance cues in Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata)
Get PDFDisturbance cues are metabolic byproducts that are argued to function as ‘early warning signals’ where both the senders and receivers can benefit from their release. These disturbance cues are used by many aquatic prey to warn conspecifics of potential local threats and provide prey with valuable information that can help increase their probability of survival following a predatory encounter. Due to their identity as metabolic byproducts, it is shown that sender diet quality influences the information conveyed to a receiver. However, only one disturbance cue study has exposed fish to ecologically relevant, natural flowing water conditions. Thus, we assessed the influence of varying ambient current flow by conditioning sender guppies in current treatment buckets for 3 days with artificially increased current flow velocities and exposed receiver guppies to the collected disturbance cues and undisturbed odours. We found no effect of the cue received and the current experienced by senders. This suggests that disturbance cues are not affected by ambient current which suggests that the cues can continue to function when streams are altered. Since responses to disturbance cue are known to be influenced by background risk, we conducted a second experiment, where background risk was manipulated. We found that high background risk fish decreased their activity significantly when exposed to disturbance cues across all current flow ranges. Interestingly, the odours of undisturbed conspecifics may function as ‘social foraging cues’ for high background risk receivers who may be more willing to forage when they perceive safety. However, neither the the current experienced by senders, nor the cue received influenced responses in low background risk fish. Overall, our results show that while the current velocity the sender experiences and their resulting levels of physical activity do not influence the responses of receiver fish, fish exposed to higher background risk appeared to be more sensitive to chemical information from conspecifics
Long Term Effects of a Physical Literacy Intervention Completed in Childhood
Get PDFPurpose: Physical literacy (PL) skills have been linked to the achievement of a healthy, and active lifestyle. PL programs can improve PL skills from pre to post intervention, but the long term improvements associated with a physical literacy intervention are unknown. Methods: Children from two schools who had previously participated in the Champions for Life (CFL) program were contacted. In total, 30 children completed the online questionnaires which included the knowledge and understanding and the motivation and confidence questionnaires from the Canadian Assessment of Physical Literacy-2 (CAPL-2), and the Physical Activity Questionnaire for Children (PAQ-C). The Child Focused Injury Risk Screening Tool (ChildFIRST) was used to assess movement competence on 45 children. Results: No difference was found in mean scores between the children who had participated and those who had not for the MC, the KU, the PAQ-C, and the ChildFIRST. A moderate correlation was determined between scores on the PAQ-C and MC but not between the PAQ-C and KU, nor the PAQ-C and the ChildFIRST. Conclusion: The results of this study suggests that a higher physical activity level in children is positively associated to their motivation and confidence they exhibit in their movements and physical activity. The results did not show that a physical literacy intervention had significant effects 4 years later on the children’s motivation and confidence, knowledge and understanding, movement competence, and physical activity levels. More research is needed to truly examine the long-term effects of a physical literacy intervention
Upgrade in Kubernetes Clusters - State of Practice and Analysis from Availability Perspective
Get PDFMany systems must run without interruptions, yet they must upgrade to address issues, such as fixing bugs or adding new functionalities. Delivering uninterrupted services is not just the responsibility of the system providing the services, but also the environment hosting the system. So, it is essential to understand and analyze the service availability guaranteed during an upgrade by the orchestration platform that hosts the system.
Kubernetes is a popular orchestrator of containerized workloads and services. It is essential to understand and analyze the impact of upgrades in a Kubernetes cluster: the effect of an upgrade on the service availability, how a failure during an upgrade is taken care of by Kubernetes and by the tools managing the Kubernetes cluster; and the effects of an upgrade process failure.
This thesis investigates, quantifies these impacts, and analyzes the causes. This thesis identifies three upgrade levels in a Kubernetes cluster: Kubernetes cluster version upgrade, Kubernetes application upgrade, and container runtime upgrade. We evaluate and analyze the state of the practice of upgrades for each level by performing various experiments under different (failure) scenarios. For each experiment, the manual collection of event timestamps and then the calculation of evaluation metrics (using collected timestamps) is a tedious and time-consuming task. To tackle this issue, we devise and implement an “Auto-Metric collector” tool that automates this process of event collection and metric calculation. The results of our experiments and analysis highlight the shortcoming of Kubernetes in identifying upgrade process failure and taking remediation measures. We propose potential solutions for some of the identified shortcomings
Screen-free learning for success in the digital age: A case study of developmentally appropriate technology use at
Get PDFAdolescence is a crucial time for the enhancement of 21st century competencies such as new media literacies, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and self-regulation. If digital interventions in education are broadly assumed to support the development of these competencies, critical research describing the challenges they pose and how best to mitigate them is needed. Developmentally appropriate technology use literature emphasizes strategies for young children in educational settings, however, the same attention has not been levied to pre-adolescents and adolescents – despite the frequency of their engagement with digital devices and their continued developmental needs. While previous research has posited Waldorf education may represent a developmentally appropriate path to new media literacy education, no studies of Waldorf schools have attended this inquiry. The purpose of this study is two-fold: 1) to describe the perspectives and practices of families and teachers at the Toronto Waldorf School with respect to technology use for pre-adolescents and adolescents; and 2) to understand the effects of a delayed technology integration in contemporary educational contexts
Infrastructures of Social Determination: Highway Poetics and Race in the Contemporary
Get PDFThis thesis examines North American contemporary poetries on the road that reverse the nationalist, mythic formulation articulated by American writers of the 1950s and 1960s. It looks at works by Cecily Nicholson, Nathaniel Mackey, and C.S. Giscombe to examine how all three poets represent the road as a fundamental tool for considering Blackness and histories of racialization and miscegenation. In making visible highway infrastructure in the poetic form, these poets reveal Blackness as a historically constructed social phenomenon and category that is produced and reproduced by infrastructural determinations as well as their organization of space and resources