992 resultados para algorithm Context
Resumo:
Within the context of international adoption, previous research has focused on parentchild attachment relationships and various aspects of the adoption process. However, less is known about other aspects of parent-child relationships (e.g., cohesion, conflict) within internationally adoptive families. Additionally, there is a need for research that explores both parent and child perceptions of the process of adoption - including pre- and post-adoptive factors - and its connection to the quality of parent-child relationships. This research utilized a qualitatively-oriented methodology to conduct separate, in-depth interviews with 10 adoptive Canadian mothers and their adopted Chinese children (aged 9 to 11 years). Results highlight parent and child reports of mainly strong, positive relationships. Several pre-adoption experiences are examined, including institutionalization, age at the time of adoption, and parental stress/expectations. A key finding concerns the link that adoptive parents perceive between the quality of their child's pre-adoptive care (i.e., mainly early institutionalized care) and the quality of their relationship. Interestingly, this link is perceived in two different ways - either as a challenge for the parent-child relationship or as a means to strengthen it. Post-adoption experiences are also explored, including cultural socialization, creating a transracial family, discussing adoption, parental stress, and sibling involvement. A key finding involves parent and child reports that cultural socialization efforts (i.e., familiarizing children with Chinese culture) are linked to more positive parent-child relationships. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to theory and practice within the context of international adoption.
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In this thesis, I work through the educational narratives of young Aboriginal women and men as I explore the relationship between cultural programming and student engagement. My analysis is structured through a collaborative Indigenous research project. My overarching task is to explore how a cultural support program, the Native Youth Advancement with Education Hamilton (NYA WEH) Program, offered at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School, located in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, attempts to re-imagine Aboriginal education in ways that directly challenge the residential school legacy. In particular, I work to illuminate how particular forms of Aboriginal education are connected to the graduation rates of Aboriginal youth. I argue that the ways in which the NYA WEH Program navigates Native Studies curriculum, relationships, and notions of culture and tradition are significant to the engagement of Aboriginal youth. This research develops theoretical connections between the contemporary experience of Aboriginal social inequality and educational initiatives which attempt to reverse that legacy. By placing the NYA WEH Program narratives side-by-side with literature supporting Aboriginal education for Self-determination, I work to learn how to best support and encourage Aboriginal student engagement in secondary schools across Ontario.
Resumo:
My goal for this research project was to explore the levels of mentoring within a disability-focused service learning context known as the Special Needs Activity Program (SNAP). At present, research on mentoring within specific service learning contexts remains largely unexamined. In an effort to assess service learning and mentoring, I completed a comparative case study across three distinct years of SNAP. Undergraduate student leaders, known as coordinators, organize and implement SNAP as a thesis project. I focused specifically on the mentoring experience of particular coordinators of SNAP. My thesis presents and describes the findings of several levels of analysis across three SNAP coordinator cohorts. The analysis focused on key words, idiomatic expressions, patterns and dissonances. In my conclusion, I offer three metaphors that describe mentoring within the SNAP experience and relate these to my discussion about how mentoring functions as a component of service learning.
Resumo:
The research presented is a qualitative case study of educators’ experiences in integrating living skills in the context of health and physical education (HPE). In using semi-structured interviews the study investigated HPE educators’ experiences and revealed their insights relative to three major themes; professional practice, challenges and support systems. Professional practice experiences detailed the use of progressive lesson planning, reflective and engaging activities, explicit student centered pedagogy as well as holistic teaching philosophies. Even further, the limited knowledge and awareness of living skills, conflicting teaching philosophies, competitive environments between subject areas and lack of time and accessibility were four major challenges that emerged throughout the data. Major supportive roles for HPE educators in the integration process included other educators, consultants, school administration, public health, parents, community programs and professional organizations. The study provides valuable discussion and suggestions for improvement of pedagogical practices in teaching living skills in the HPE setting.
Resumo:
DNA assembly is among the most fundamental and difficult problems in bioinformatics. Near optimal assembly solutions are available for bacterial and small genomes, however assembling large and complex genomes especially the human genome using Next-Generation-Sequencing (NGS) technologies is shown to be very difficult because of the highly repetitive and complex nature of the human genome, short read lengths, uneven data coverage and tools that are not specifically built for human genomes. Moreover, many algorithms are not even scalable to human genome datasets containing hundreds of millions of short reads. The DNA assembly problem is usually divided into several subproblems including DNA data error detection and correction, contig creation, scaffolding and contigs orientation; each can be seen as a distinct research area. This thesis specifically focuses on creating contigs from the short reads and combining them with outputs from other tools in order to obtain better results. Three different assemblers including SOAPdenovo [Li09], Velvet [ZB08] and Meraculous [CHS+11] are selected for comparative purposes in this thesis. Obtained results show that this thesis’ work produces comparable results to other assemblers and combining our contigs to outputs from other tools, produces the best results outperforming all other investigated assemblers.
Resumo:
There is a paucity of studies comparing social buffering in adolescents and adults, despite their marked differences in social behaviour. I investigated whether greater effects of social buffering on plasma corticosterone concentrations and expression of Zif268 in neural regions after an acute stressor would be found in adolescent compared with adult rats. Samples were obtained before and after one hour of isolation stress and after either one or three hours of recovery back in the colony with either a familiar or unfamiliar cage partner. Adolescent and adult rats did not differ in plasma concentrations of corticosterone at any time point. Corticosterone concentrations were higher after one hour isolation than at baseline (p < 0.001), and rats with a familiar partner during the recovery phase had lower corticosterone concentrations than did rats with an unfamiliar partner (p = 0.02). Zif268 immunoreactive cell counts were higher in the arcuate nucleus in both age groups after isolation (p = 0.007) and higher in the paraventricular nucleus of adolescents compared with adults during the recovery phase irrespective of partner familiarity. There was a significant decrease in immunoreactive cell counts after one hour isolation compared to baseline in the basolateral amygdala, central nucleus of the amygdala, and in the pyramidal layer of the hippocampus (all p < 0.05). An effect of partner familiarity on Zif268 immunoreactive cell counts was found in the granule layer of the dentate gyrus irrespective of age (higher in those with a familiar partner, p = 0.03) and in the medial prefrontal cortex in adolescents (higher with an unfamiliar partner, p = 0.02). Overall, the acute stress and partner familiarity produced a similar pattern of results in adolescents and adults, with both age groups sensitive to the social context.
Resumo:
Ordered gene problems are a very common classification of optimization problems. Because of their popularity countless algorithms have been developed in an attempt to find high quality solutions to the problems. It is also common to see many different types of problems reduced to ordered gene style problems as there are many popular heuristics and metaheuristics for them due to their popularity. Multiple ordered gene problems are studied, namely, the travelling salesman problem, bin packing problem, and graph colouring problem. In addition, two bioinformatics problems not traditionally seen as ordered gene problems are studied: DNA error correction and DNA fragment assembly. These problems are studied with multiple variations and combinations of heuristics and metaheuristics with two distinct types or representations. The majority of the algorithms are built around the Recentering- Restarting Genetic Algorithm. The algorithm variations were successful on all problems studied, and particularly for the two bioinformatics problems. For DNA Error Correction multiple cases were found with 100% of the codes being corrected. The algorithm variations were also able to beat all other state-of-the-art DNA Fragment Assemblers on 13 out of 16 benchmark problem instances.
Resumo:
Understanding the relationship between genetic diseases and the genes associated with them is an important problem regarding human health. The vast amount of data created from a large number of high-throughput experiments performed in the last few years has resulted in an unprecedented growth in computational methods to tackle the disease gene association problem. Nowadays, it is clear that a genetic disease is not a consequence of a defect in a single gene. Instead, the disease phenotype is a reflection of various genetic components interacting in a complex network. In fact, genetic diseases, like any other phenotype, occur as a result of various genes working in sync with each other in a single or several biological module(s). Using a genetic algorithm, our method tries to evolve communities containing the set of potential disease genes likely to be involved in a given genetic disease. Having a set of known disease genes, we first obtain a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network containing all the known disease genes. All the other genes inside the procured PPI network are then considered as candidate disease genes as they lie in the vicinity of the known disease genes in the network. Our method attempts to find communities of potential disease genes strongly working with one another and with the set of known disease genes. As a proof of concept, we tested our approach on 16 breast cancer genes and 15 Parkinson's Disease genes. We obtained comparable or better results than CIPHER, ENDEAVOUR and GPEC, three of the most reliable and frequently used disease-gene ranking frameworks.
Resumo:
With most students in Canada spending approximately 180 days a year in school, averaging more than six hours a day (Morrison & Kirby, 2011), Wei, Szumilas and Kutcher (2011) argue that this places educational institutions in an unique position in terms of influencing the health and well-being of students. This brings forth the need for school environments to be utilized in ways that are conducive to promoting student development. Much of the educational and developmental components embedded within the school system as well as experiences within greatly influence student’s health and well-being. A national statement was made a concerning American children’s education and mental health that is greatly applicable to the Canadian school system. It was stated that schools “must be active partners in the mental health care of our children” because of the “important interplay between emotional health and school success” (Lazarus & Sulkowski, 2011, pp. 15-16). This identifies the need to ensure that all students, as much as possible, are being provided with safe environments and sufficient support in order to encourage positive developmental trajectories of student health and well-being.
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In this thesis we are going to analyze the dictionary graphs and some other kinds of graphs using the PagerRank algorithm. We calculated the correlation between the degree and PageRank of all nodes for a graph obtained from Merriam-Webster dictionary, a French dictionary and WordNet hypernym and synonym dictionaries. Our conclusion was that PageRank can be a good tool to compare the quality of dictionaries. We studied some artificial social and random graphs. We found that when we omitted some random nodes from each of the graphs, we have not noticed any significant changes in the ranking of the nodes according to their PageRank. We also discovered that some social graphs selected for our study were less resistant to the changes of PageRank.
Resumo:
Within the school setting, recess is often reported as a frequent context for bullying (Vaillancourt et al. 2010), but is currently understudied. The present study utilized a mixed-methods approach in order to examine the frequency of peer victimization at recess and explore how the current context of recess relates to children’s sense of belonging. Participants included 464 students between grades 4 to 8 from nine Southern Ontario elementary schools. Self-report measures on peer victimization and belongingness were completed, along with open-ended questions regarding the recess context. Results demonstrated the frequencies of peer victimization at recess, the relationship between victimization and belonging, contextual factors that promote and impede belongingness at recess, and solutions to support children who feel left out.These findings provide further insight for educators and administrators in order to better support children who experience victimization within the recess context.
Resumo:
Watersheds are complex systems involving social, economic, and ecological dimensions that are constantly interacting and influencing each other, and governance of these systems involve a large and diverse cast of actors that add to the complexity and difficulty in deciding what is best for the watershed and people. Resilience thinking offers a way to understand and navigate the uncertainty, dynamics and complexity of watershed governance. This primer describes key ideas associated with resilience: more inclusive participation; building a shared understanding; inclusion of ecosystem services and functions in long-term planning; strong leadership; institutional and decision making flexibility; and, a decentralized system. This primer is an initial effort to translate the scholarly understanding of these key ideas and initiate a dialogue about their application in the context of watershed governance.
Resumo:
Adjustement is an ongoing process by which factors of reallocated to equalize their returns in different uses. Adjustment occurs though market mechanisms or intrafirm reallocation of resources as a result of changes in terms of trade, government policies, resource availability, technological change, etc. These changes alter production opportunities and production, transaction and information costs, and consequently modify production functions, organizational design, etc. In this paper we define adjustment (section 2); review empirical estimates of the extent of adjustment in Canada and abroad (section 3); review selected features of the trade policy and adjustment context of relevance for policy formulation among which: slow growth, a shift to services, a shift to the Pacific Rim, the internationalization of production, investment distribution communications the growing use of NTB's, changes in foreign direct investment patterns, intrafirm and intraindustry trade, interregional trade flows, differences in micro economic adjustment processes of adjustment as between subsidiaries and Canadian companies (section 4); examine methodologies and results of studies of the impact of trade liberalization on jobs (section 5); and review the R. Harris general equilibrium model (section 6). Our conclusion emphasizes the importance of harmonizing commercial and domestic policies dealing with adjustment (section 7). We close with a bibliography of relevant publications.