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The City as a Playground: Reimagining Design through Skateboarding
Get PDFThe City as a Playground offers a glimpse of city building through the lens of a skateboarder. While the sport is often characterized as a kind of anti-urbanism, a youth dominated, risk-oriented counterculture, I argue that skateboarding could be embraced as a method for community building, city mapping, and exploration. This thesis examines the intersection of architecture, adaptive reuse and skateboarding to demonstrate that skateboarders and skate-related initiatives can bring new life into dormant urban spaces, transforming them into vibrant hubs of creativity and community. By using skateboarding as a form of urban practice, designers can realize alternative approaches that challenge traditional notions of public space
The Chinese Expression and the Representation of Environmentalism in New Chinese Science Fiction
Get PDFThis thesis focuses on the film and television adaptations of two acclaimed novels by Liu Cixin, The Wandering Earth (2019 & 2023) and Three-Body (2024), which are the main-melody audio-visual works. By analyzing these works from the perspectives of ecocriticism, anthropocentrism, and traditional Chinese values, I will examine how contemporary Chinese science fiction reflects and critiques the intersection of environmental issues, human nature, and cultural philosophy in the context of the global environmental crisis. Also, traditional Chinese values, particularly Confucianism and Taoism, play an important role in shaping these films' narrative and thematic structure. The collective good and the harmony between humans and nature are consistent with traditional Chinese thought and provide a unique cultural perspective for understanding the future dilemmas presented in the films. This thesis argues that these works' combination of ecocriticism, anthropocentric criticism, and Chinese philosophical traditions makes a distinctive contribution to the global science fiction discourse
Governing Open Data as a Digital Public Good: Provision Challenges and Supply Issues
Get PDFGovernments around the world are implementing policies to freely share their data online to enhance transparency and promote reusability for the benefit of society. These policies and accompanying governance have had mixed results, and literature shows that there are issues concerning data provision, quality, and usage. To address these shortcomings this research proposes that open data be governed as a public good. It argues that open data is a common pool resource (CPR), and therefore the existing governance principles of such resources can be applied to open data. Existing literature has not treated open data as a digital commons. This is a concern because there is a rich literature on commons governance in natural settings. If open data is a type of commons in a digital setting, then it can borrow governance principles from CPR theories to see if it resolves the issues that open data faces. This research first makes the case that open data is indeed a CPR by evaluating open data analytics. It finds that there are undesirable results in the open data being published and draws similarities to the tragedies faced by natural commons, arguing the same root cause – ungoverned open access. The research follows this finding by proposing two open data governance practices based on CPR governance principles. One is drawing on behavioural public choice theory’s action bias to engage with business and civil society to promote open data as a means to instigate more open data provision. The other is to treat open data portals as open systems with an active feedback loop between data producers and consumers, with minimum centralized intervention, to address the quality and usage issue of open data. By connecting open data and common pool resources and highlighting the peculiarities of digital goods, this research suggests including digital assets as a new type of good, and thereby extend the existing taxonomy of public goods. The research also finds that the public choices and collective action dilemmas bureaucrats face can be overcome with action bias and strong incentives even when taking action is irrational
Regional-scale mapping of native grasslands in Alberta, Canada, using optical and microwave remote sensing
Get PDFCanada’s Prairie grasslands are ecologically and agriculturally significant but face threats from climate change, urban expansion, and resource extraction. Accurate mapping of these grasslands is essential for conservation, sustainable management, and understanding land use change. This thesis explores methodological advancements in mapping Prairie grasslands using high-resolution satellite imagery, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), machine learning (ML), and geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA). These tools address challenges in distinguishing native grasslands from spectrally similar land cover classes, like seeded forage, which complicates traditional mapping techniques. Focusing on Southern Alberta’s ecoregions, the research investigates the spatial and temporal variability of compact polarimetric C-band SAR backscatter in native and tame grasslands, providing insights into their complex environments. Results highlight the limitations of a "one-size-fits-all" approach due to the variability within the Prairie ecozone, emphasizing the need for spatially robust field monitoring to enhance provincial and federal land cover classification efforts. The findings demonstrate significant improvements in regional-scale grassland mapping accuracy, enabling better identification of at-risk areas and informing targeted conservation initiatives. Additionally, the research underscores the importance of investing in SAR infrastructure for terrestrial vegetation mapping in Canada. By advancing remote sensing methodologies, this study contributes to geography and provides a framework for environmental monitoring and management. Its practical implications extend to policymakers, conservationists, and land managers working to preserve the ecological integrity of Canada’s Prairie grasslands
Text-Guided Image-to-Image Translation for Converting RGB Maps to Tactile Images
Get PDFTactile graphics provide blind and visually impaired individuals access to visual information through touch, aiding navigation, education, and social interaction. However, manual tactile design is costly, time-intensive, and difficult to scale. This thesis proposes a novel approach to generate tactile maps from RGB maps using text-guided image-to-image translation. By leveraging natural language prompts, the method enables control over map details, such as lakes, rivers, and cities, allowing outputs to be tailored to specific needs. A custom dataset of 1,845 RGB maps was developed, paired with multiple tactile counterparts, each reflecting unique combinations of detail levels for map components. Text prompts were crafted to describe these tactile variations, resulting in 9,800 triplets (RGB map, tactile map, prompt) for training and evaluation. Human evaluations confirmed the model outperforms a baseline model, with 47% of outputs requiring minimal adjustments. This scalable solution streamlines tactile map production while maintaining high quality
Evaluating annual carbon dioxide exchange between the atmosphere and shrub tundra in Canada’s Southern Arctic
Get PDFThe carbon cycle of Arctic tundra ecosystems is expected to change as the climate warms and shrub vegetation expands. However, there are few studies that have compared full year carbon fluxes over tundra with different shrub cover. In this study, soil respiration was measured year-round using forced-diffusion chambers and ecosystem-scale net ecosystem exchange of CO2 (NEE) was measured from spring through fall using eddy covariance towers at three Canadian tundra sites with varying dwarf birch shrub cover. Soil respiration was larger at the site with most shrubs during most months except winter when soil CO2 emissions were similarly small at all three sites. Although there was more growing season net CO2 uptake at the site with more shrubs, relatively large emissions in spring and fall offset this sink strength so that all three sites were similarly small annual net sinks of CO2 (-19 to -31 g C m-2)
Impacts of Early Life Seizures on Memory Specificity
Get PDFMemory specificity is the ability to recall an event and its specific details. This function is dependent on the ability of the dorsal CA1 (dCA1) of the hippocampus to encode and recall a sparse memory engram. Additionally, engram cells must be responding to contextual relevant cues, rather than random intrinsically driven activation. We hypothesis that an early life seizure (ELS) can induce a chronic upregulation in dCA1 activity, preventing the encoding and recall of sparse memory engrams and the loss of memory specificity. We found that a seizure at P10 significantly increases the baseline activation of the dCA1 at P24. Additionally, seizure mice also display a loss of memory specificity and show significantly larger memory engrams in the dCA1 following memory specificity testing, suggesting that large populations of neurons allocated to the memory engram are not encoding for contextually relevant stimuli
Capturing the Realities of Diaspora & Dissident Communities Experiencing Transnational Suppression from the Chinese Party-State Apparatus
Get PDFThis thesis is an original contribution to academic literature on the lived experiences of diaspora and dissident communities with surviving transnational surveillance from the Chinese party-state apparatus. Written by a community insider, this project brought community knowledge to academia. The author conducted interviews with eleven participants: one identified both as Hongkonger and Chinese, 3 Hongkongers, 1 Chinese, 3 Tibetans, 1 Taiwanese, 1 Uyghur, and 1 white Canadian. The project recorded the experiences and invisible labour of participants, including being defined as “Chinese” in attempted erasure of their ethnic identities, reclaiming their communities and right to self-identity, extensive safety concerns due to fear of being targeted by the Chinese government, and feelings of profound disappointment due to Canadian institutions’ inaction to support and protect them, while staying hopeful for the future. The author also drew boundaries to safeguard certain knowledge from academia, balancing her dual identity as a dissident and researcher