Sport-Specific Practice and the Development of Expert Decision-Making in Team Ball Sports

The role of sport-specific practice in the development of decision-making expertise in the sports of field hockey, netball, and basketball was examined. Fifteen expert decision-makers and 13 experienced non-expert athletes provided detailed information about the quantity and type of sport-specific and other related practice activities they had undertaken throughout their careers. Experts accumulated more hours of sport-specific practice from age 12 years onwards than did non-experts, spending on average some 13 years and 4,000 hours on concentrated sport-specific practice before reaching international standard. A significant negative correlation existed between the number of additional activities undertaken and the hours of sportspecific training required before attaining expertise, suggesting a functional role for activities other than sport-specific training in the development of expert decision-making.

Design of an Experimental Rig to Characterize the Gust Response of Small Wind Turbines and Autorotating Seeds

This thesis investigates the rotational behavior of abstracted small-wind-turbine rotors exposed to a sudden increase in oncoming flow velocity, i.e. a gust. These rotors consisted of blades with aspect ratios characteristic of samara seeds, which are known for their ability to maintain autorotation in unsteady wind. The models were tested in a towing tank using a custom-built experimental rig. The setup was designed and constructed to allow for the measurement of instantaneous angular velocity of a rotor model towed at a prescribed kinematic profile along the tank. The conclusions presented in this thesis are based on the observed trends in effective angle-of-attack distribution, tip speed ratio, angular velocity, and time delay in the rotational response for each of rotors over prescribed gust cases. It was found that the blades with the higher aspect ratio had higher tip speed ratios and responded faster than the blades with a lower aspect ratio. The decrease in instantaneous tip speed ratio during the onset of a prescribed gust correlated with the time delay in each rotor model's rotational response. The time delays were found to increase nonlinearly with decreasing durations over which the simulated gusts occurred.

Small Town Downtown Revitalization: Applying the Main Street Approach to the towns of Perth and Carleton Place, Ontario

The downtown main street of small towns is traditionally the economic, cultural, and social heart of the community, thereby requiring particular attention from planners and researchers alike. Considering modern threats to main streets including suburban sprawl and "big box" development, revitalization strategies are essential to ensuring longevity and vitality of small towns’ cores, in terms of economy, built environment, heritage, and identity. The Main Street Approach was established to mitigate challenges by providing a revitalization tool-kit for small Canadian towns, focusing on organization, marketing and promotion, economic and commercial development, and design and physical improvements. To better understand existing municipal tools for downtown revitalization in Ontario, a comparative analysis of the towns of Carleton Place and Perth's policies was conducted using the four pillars of the Main Street Approach as benchmark for best practice, and recommendations for other small towns to better incorporate revitalization policies were suggested.