Carleton University Institutional Repository
Not a member yet
20816 research outputs found
Sort by
Impulsivity as a Moderator of the Intention-Behaviour Gap
No full textThe intention-behaviour gap arises when people fail to convert their intentions into behaviour. Although limited research has sought to determine if impulsivity as an individual difference moderates the intention-behaviour gap, the issue has been examined exclusively in the context of established behaviour. Given that features of impulsivity pertain to seizing opportunities with little regard to the consequences, seeking novelty, and welcoming new and exciting experiences, this dissertation presents three studies that, together, represent a program of research focused on determining whether impulsivity moderated the intention-behaviour gap for new behaviour. In Study 1, a total of 51 participants took part in online semi-structured interviews to qualitatively assess how they reported experiencing the intention-behaviour gap for new behaviour. Thematic analysis identified two main themes related to participants’ perceptions and experiences about the intention-behaviour gap and new behaviour. Participants with high impulsivity (n=26) reported a greater preference for new behaviour and for following through on their intentions to start a new behaviour than participants with low impulsivity (n=25). In Study 2, a longitudinal observational design was conducted (n = 405) to explore whether impulsivity moderated the intention-behaviour gap for new engagement in virtual fitness. Consistent with the hypothesis, among participants high in impulsivity, greater intentions were more strongly linked to the likelihood of engaging in virtual fitness at least once during a 7-day period, whereas for participants low in impulsivity, greater intention was not associated with new virtual fitness engagement. This moderation effect was extended to Study 3 using an experimental design. Participants (n=436) who were randomly assigned to view a persuasion message (n=219) to increase their intention to engage in a new virtual fitness behaviour (versus control condition, n=217) reported significantly higher engagement in virtual fitness than participants low in impulsivity. Overall, this program of research demonstrated that impulsivity—an individual difference usually associated with maladaptive outcomes, negative consequences, and health risk behaviours—moderated the intention-behaviour relation for a new health promoting behaviour among young adults
Urban Refugees and Digital Technology : Reshaping Social, Political, and Economic Networks
No full textThis book is available in open access to all readers.
Please download the book and consult the copyright page and acknowledgments to determine the organizations responsible for financially supporting that access, in addition to McGill-Queen's University Press (https://www.mqup.ca) and Local Engagement Refugee Research Network (https://carleton.ca/lerrn) with the assistance of the Carleton University Library.
The series editors would really appreciate hearing about readers' experiences and uses of this edition of the ebook. To share, please write to [email protected] technology is reshaping urban refugees’ lives in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia’s growing cities.
Refugees and displaced people are increasingly moving to cities around the world, seeking out the social, economic, and political opportunity that urban areas provide. Against this backdrop digital technologies are fundamentally changing how refugees and displaced people engage with urban landscapes and economies where they settle.
Urban Refugees and Digital Technology draws on contemporary data gathered from refugee communities in Bogotá, Nairobi, and Kuala Lumpur to build a new theoretical understanding of how technological change influences the ways urban refugees contribute to the social, economic, and political networks in their cities of arrival. This data is presented against the broader history of technological change in urban areas since the start of industrialization, showing how displaced people across time have used technologized urban spaces to shape the societies where they settle. The case studies and history demonstrate how refugees’ interactions with environments that are often hostile to their presence spur novel adaptations to idiosyncratic features of a city’s technological landscape.
A wide-ranging study across histories and geographies of urban displacement, Urban Refugees and Digital Technology introduces readers to the myriad ways technological change creates spaces for urban refugees to build rich political, social, and economic lives in cities
The Emotional Economy of Care: Precarious Funding and Structural Violence in Canadian Non-Profit Social Services
No full textThis dissertation explores the influence of funding dynamics within the non-profit social services (NPSS) sector serving seniors in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, particularly focusing on how these dynamics contribute to gender-based structural violence against women workers. It utilizes a multi-disciplinary theoretical framework, integrating feminist political economy (FPE), affect theory, and theories of structural violence to analyze the intersection of gender, labour, and systemic challenges. Employing qualitative methods, including ethnographic fieldwork and 25 in-depth interviews conducted before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study provides a detailed examination of how pandemic-related policies have intensified pre-existing inequalities. I argue the NPSS’s precarious funding models, influenced by neoliberal policies, create conditions that can be understood as gender-based structural violence. I show how this form of violence is specific to the sector, stemming from the cyclical nature of funding which directly affects the material conditions and emotional demands of care work. The study uses concepts of structural violence, to help understand and theorize a cycle of funding in the sector with deep systemic roots. The analysis explores the material and emotional repercussions of these funding practices, revealing their profound impact on organizational, interpersonal, and care quality levels within the sector. Through affect theory, this dissertation articulates a “structure of feeling” that captures the collective emotional burden of workers, framed within an emotional economy of care. This funding cycle often exists alongside workers’ feelings of happiness, fulfillment, and meaningful work, driven by a profound sense of moral obligation, creating a bittersweet contradiction that helps understands why women stay in these challenging roles. Workers were seen to cling to the "cruel optimism" described by Berlant (2011), holding onto unattainable goals for significant change. However, women also display, what I call resilient optimism, engaging in collective care, resistance, and advocacy to manage and confront their difficult situations. This research calls for the restructuring of funding practices and workplace policies to enhance funding sustainability and equity, ensuring the sector can better support its predominantly women workforce, who are crucial to the delivery of essential community services
Third Place in the Space Race: Securitizing Rhetoric, the Logic of Threat, and the Securitization of the Canadian Civil Space Program
No full textThe description of the Space Age as the “Space Race” would require there to be both winners and losers. But in the case of Canada, its trajectory as an emerging spacefaring state at the height of the Cold War was not based on winning the competition but rather ensuring that Canada could continue the race, no matter the pace. From the beginning, Canada took an independent path based on its own national interests within the larger context of the rivalry created between the United States and Soviet Union. What is curious about this approach is that, unlike the superpowers, Canada’s national civil space program shifted its focus several times over the course of the Cold War due to domestic factors, ranging from an emphasis on space science activities to domestic communication satellites. This dissertation questions the security dilemma interpretation of space-faring states during the Cold War by moving beyond the state-centric argument of space power rivalry and escalation and instead focuses on the role that motivated bureaucratic actors played in shaping the national civil space program of middle power states, such as Canada. This dissertation proposes the application of securitization theory to better explain the relationship between the development of national civil space programs and national security during the early Space Age. It focuses on the identification, construction, and socialization of civil space activities as a security issue within the Canadian federal government and the corresponding political effect of such securitizing moves on the trajectory of Canada as a spacefaring state throughout the Cold War. The process of securitization is demonstrable through the propagation of a space policy logic that considers the framing of existential threats. The institutional interactions of these logics served to influence political decision makers and departments in supporting specific space activities over others, from scientific satellites like the first Alouettes to communication satellites and the human spaceflight program
De-Industrializing Heritage: Ottawa's Metallurgy Complex Counterproposal
No full textHow might heritage adaptation become a conduit for community preservation and restorative justice? Industrial ruins situated in urban cores, become artifact, representing an imposed settler hierarchy of the past. These spaces also become conduits for urban redevelopment with the intent of enhancing tourism and economic systems. However this mode of architectural intervention forms exclusionary environments, that do not meet the requirements of communities or the environment. This thesis explores modes in which heritage adaptation could perhaps provide dignity for land and people. Through precedent studies, literature review, and making, a counter proposal for Ottawa’s Metallurgy district is proposed, which proposes bioremediate architecture to aid in formulating a new dialogue between the environment and people, whilst embracing the cyclical processes of the land
Design and Implementation of a Low-cost IoT Smart Weather Station Framework
Get PDFMonitoring systems have become more and more crucial in our lives in recent years. Consequently, we propose in this work an automatic weather monitoring system that is capable of obtaining dynamic, real-time climatic data for a given area. The Internet of Things (IoT), a sophisticated and effective method of connecting objects to the Internet, serves as the scientific foundation for this system. Many areas of practice and science rely on accurate climate measurements. Location and time of day influence weather factors, especially in tropical areas where there are no seasons. Furthermore, as precision agriculture or smart agriculture advances, it will be crucial to improve the measurement of systems that are widely distributed over growing areas. For these reasons, the design, building, and fabrication of a mobile air conditioner with Wi-Fi connectivity and solar energy power is presented in this work. This station measures both relative humidity and temperature. Additionally, workstations can be configured and managed remotely. The program's objective is to promote the creation of freely accessible, open-source hardware. A meteorological base station framework based on the ESP-32 Internet of Things device development board is proposed in this study. The system has a feature that records the ambient temperature and humidity. The ESP-32 web server then makes the data available to the user. A web page is also part of the system to make controlling adjacent instruments easier. The system gets its power from solar electricity
A spiking neuron model of moral judgment in trolley dilemmas
Get PDFPeople will make different moral judgments in similar moral dilemmas where one can act to sacrifice some number of lives to save several more. Research has shown that although people can reason that an action would save more lives, automatic processes can overwrite deliberate reasoning. Having participants imagine hypothetical moral dilemmas, researchers have discovered that factors such as action/omission, means/side-effect, and personal/impersonal can affect judgment. Joshua Greene suggests that these features do not affect people’s judgment because they are morally relevant but are instead a result of the myopic nature of the automatic moral process. Greene hypothesizes that there is some myopic module or domain-general process that attaches a negative emotional response to an action when one is contemplating violent actions. In the present research a model of this myopic automatic process is paired with an analytic system to replicate deontological and utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. Our system, MERDJ, models this in simulated spiking neurons. The system takes in representations of specific moral dilemmas as inputs and outputs judgments of appropriate or inappropriate
Improvising Across Abilities : Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument
Get PDFImprovising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) brings together scholars, musicians, and family members of people with disabilities to collectively recount years of personal experiences, research, and perspectives on the societal and community impact of inclusive musical improvisation. One of the lesser-known projects of composer, improviser, and humanitarian, Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016), the AUMI was designed as a liberating and affordable alternative to the constraints of instruments created only for normative bodies, thus opening a doorway for people of all ages, genders, abilities, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds to access artistic practice with others. More than a book about AUMI, this book is an invitation to readers to use AUMI in their own communities. This book, which contains wisdom from many who have been affected by their work with the instrument and the people who use it, is a representation of how music and extemporized performance have touched the lives and minds of scholars and families alike. Not only has AUMI provided the opportunity to grow in listening to others who may speak differently (or not at all), but it has been used as an avenue for a diverse set of people to build friendships with others whom they may have never otherwise even glanced at in the street. By providing a space for every person who comes across AUMI to perform, listen, improvise, and collaborate, the continuing development of this instrument contributes to a world in which every person is heard, welcomed, and celebrated
The aryl hydrocarbon receptor in b-cells mediates the effects of TCDD on glucose homeostasis in mice
Get PDFObjective Chronic exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POPs) is associated with increased incidence of type 2 diabetes, hyperglycemia, and poor insulin secretion in humans. Dioxins and dioxin-like compounds are a broad class of POPs that exert cellular toxicity through activation of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR). We previously showed that a single high-dose injection of 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD, aka dioxin; 20 μg/kg) in vivo reduced fasted and glucose-stimulated plasma insulin levels for up to 6 weeks in male and female mice. TCDD-exposed male mice were also modestly hypoglycemic and had increased insulin sensitivity, whereas TCDD-exposed females were transiently glucose intolerant. Whether these effects are driven by AhR activation in β-cells requires investigation. Methods We exposed female and male β-cell specific Ahr knockout (βAhrKO) mice and littermate Ins1-Cre genotype controls (βAhrWT) to a single high dose of 20 μg/kg TCDD and tracked the mice for 6 weeks. Results Under baseline conditions, deleting AhR from β-cells caused hypoglycemia in female mice, increased insulin secretion ex vivo in female mouse islets, and promoted modest weight gain in male mice. Importantly, high-dose TCDD exposure impaired glucose homeostasis and β-cell function in βAhrWT mice, but these phenotypes were largely abolished in TCDD-exposed βAhrKO mice. Conclusion Our study demonstrates that AhR signaling in β-cells is important for regulating baseline β-cell function in female mice and energy homeostasis in male mice. We also show that β-cell AhR signaling largely mediates the effects of TCDD on glucose homeostasis in both sexes, suggesting that the effects of TCDD on β-cell function and health are driving metabolic phenotypes in peripheral tissues
Comparative 142 Nd and 182 W study of MORBs and the 4.5 Gyr evolution of the upper mantle
Get PDFNew high precision Nd and W isotopic compositions were obtained on the same basalt samples from the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge. These provide the best estimate so far for the μ142Nd and μ182W values of the depleted mantle source of mid-ocean ridge basalts known as DMM. The PAR basalts yield a mean μ142Nd = −1.6 ± 5.0 (2 s.d.) and μ182W = −1.9 ± 3.5 (2 s.d.), which together with the literature data allow the isotope composition of the DMM to be constrained. The present-day DMM μ182W is 10–20 ppm lower than that of the Archean mantle. This decrease could be related to the broad incorporation of mantle plume material into the upper man tle, starting between 2.4 and 3 billion years ago, due to the onset of deep cold slab subduction, and its attendant return mantle flow