Staying on Board: Non-profit housing provider board capacity in a changing context

As their funding and operating agreements with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation expire, non-profit housing providers look to their boards of directors for direction. Boards must adapt to a wholly new context in order to continue to offer low-cost housing: less predictable revenue, new regulations, a new relationship with a different part of the provincial government, and new opportunities to use the equity in their properties. At the same time, some of the previous context remains: aging buildings, low reserve funds, and sometimes, board makeup that has not changed in decades. Interviews with housing providers, policymakers, and others involved in low-cost housing provision in Manitoba show that while many boards are ready and willing to transition into their new context, others are not, and may require additional supports if they are to continue to offer housing into the future."This paper draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

The Lack of Competition in the Music Industries, the Effect on Working Musicians, and the Loss of Canadian Music Heritage

A Brief Submitted By: The Cultural Capital Project: Digital Stewardship and Sustainable Monetization for Canadian Musicians Presented to: Making Competition Work for Canadians: A consultation on the future of competition policy in CanadaIt is our contention that the music industries in Canada exhibit an oligopoly structure, formed of a handful of non-competitive, non-Canadian firms, which gravely harms both the livelihoods of Canadian musicians and the long term sustainability of Canadian music. Our research concludes the problem is not a consequence of anything unique to music as a cultural product, but partially a function of how competition is regulated in this country, or, more accurately, not regulated. Along with more rigorous enforcement of competition, we recommend that the Competition Act be updated to center the concerns of workers and consumers, which would have ripple effects on the health of many sectors in Canada, including music.Research contributing to this brief was conducted with a SSHRC gran

Cryptographic Techniques for Data Privacy in Digital Forensics

The acquisition and analysis of data in digital forensics raise different data privacy challenges. Many existing works on digital forensic readiness discuss what information should be stored and how to collect relevant data to facilitate investigations. However, the cost of this readiness often directly impacts the privacy of innocent third parties and suspects if the collected information is irrelevant. Approaches that have been suggested for privacy-preserving digital forensics focus on the use of policy, non-cryptography-based, and cryptography-based solutions. Cryptographic techniques have been proposed to address issues of data privacy during data analysis. As the utilization of some of these cryptographic techniques continues to increase, it is important to evaluate their applicability and challenges in relation to digital forensics processes. This study provides digital forensics investigators and researchers with a roadmap to understanding the data privacy challenges in digital forensics and examines the various privacy techniques that can be utilized to tackle these challenges. Specifically, we review the cryptographic techniques applied for privacy protection in digital forensics and categorize them within the context of whether they support trusted third parties, multiple investigators, and multi-keyword searches. We highlight some of the drawbacks of utilizing cryptography-based methods in privacy-preserving digital forensics and suggest potential solutions to the identified shortcomings. In addition, we propose a conceptual privacy-preserving digital forensics (PPDF) model that is based on the use of cryptographic techniques and analyze the model within the context of the above-mentioned factors. An evaluation of the model is provided through a consideration of identified factors that may affect an investigation. Lastly, we provide an analysis of how existing principles for preserving privacy in digital forensics are addressed in our PPDF model. Our evaluation shows that the model aligns with many of the existing privacy principles recommended for privacy protection in digital forensics.This work was supported by The University of Winnipeg (Grant ID: 16792)

Securing Intrusion Detection Systems in IoT Networks Against Adversarial Learning: A Moving Target Defense Approach based on Reinforcement Learning

Investigating the use of moving target defense (MTD) mechanisms in IoT networks is ongoing research, with unfathomable potential to equip IoT devices and networks with the ability to fend off cyber attacks despite the computational deficiencies many IoT ecosystems typically have. The AI community has extensively studied adversarial threats and attacks on machine learning-based systems, emphasizing the need to address the potential compromise of anomaly-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) through adversarial attacks. Another concept that has gained significant attention in the networking community is Game Theory. Protecting any given network is almost a never-ending battle between the attacker and defender, and hence a natural game of competitors can be modelled based on one’s parametric specifications to gain more insight into how attackers might interact with one’s system. The goal of this thesis is to propose a comprehensive, experimentally verifiable game-theoretic model of MTD in IoT networks to secure the IDS against adversarial attacks. Once a game with state transitions based on given actions can be modelled, reinforcement learning is used to develop policies based on various episodes (rounds) of the game, ultimately optimizing network decisions to minimize successful attacks on machine learning-based IDS. The state-of-the-art ToN-IoT dataset was investigated for MTD feasibility to implement the feature-based MTD approach. The overall performance of the proposed MTD-based IDS was compared to a conventional IDS by analyzing the accuracy curve of the MTD-based IDS and the conventional IDS for varying attacker success rates and resource demands. Our approach has proven effective in securing the IDS against adversarial learning.Master of Science in Applied Computer Scienc

Adult activities of endangered Oarisma poweshiek butterflies are associated with a soil moisture gradient in tall grass prairie in Manitoba, Canada

Accepted version of manuscriptEndangered in Canada and the United States, the Poweshiek skipperling’s (Oarisma poweshiek (Parker) (Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae)) recovery likely depends on understanding more about its ecology. The characteristics of locations which facilitate various adult activities, such as oviposition and resting, in Manitoba tall grass prairie are unknown. We followed adults in prairie patches to identify locations associated with various behaviours, and subsequently measure vegetative, structural and microclimatic attributes at these microhabitats. Adult skipperlings were observed 34 times resulting in 24 flight tracks and 56 point interactions being recorded. Skipperlings flew almost exclusively in the prairie plant community, with few flights into wetter communities and none in forests. Tracks tended to be tortuous, typical of occupancy in higher-quality habitats. Adult activities appeared to be distributed along a soil moisture gradient: oviposition was associated with the relatively mesic section, resting and/or basking with the drier section, and nectar feeding generally associated with sections throughout the gradient. Adults nectared from a mixture of species during the flight period, consuming nectar from Rudbeckia hirta Linnaeus (Asteraceae) most often. We report previously unknown aspects of O. poweshiek’s ecology. Implications for conservation: Our findings describe how adult skipperlings might use sections of prairie with different soil moistures to lay eggs, rest, bask and consume nectar. We visualise approaches to ensure all sections are disturbed during stewardship activities and evaluate the degree to which all facilitative soil moistures are present in candidate (re)introduction sites, for the successful recovery of O. poweshiek."We appreciate the financial support from Canadian Wildlife Service (facilitated by MC); Nature Conservancy of Canada; University of Winnipeg; and Wildlife, Fisheries and Resource Enforcement Branch (WW; Government of Manitoba)."https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10841-023-00502-

Indigenous Student-Led Decolonial Movements in Higher Education: A Case Study of the Indigenous Course Requirement at the University of Winnipeg

This research study seeks to explore the nature of decolonial tactics and strategies, theorized as decolonial movements, that are engaged by Indigenous students in higher education through a case-study of the Indigenous student-led initiatives that led to the mandatory ICR at UWinnipeg in 2016. The ICR at UWinnipeg was specifically chosen for this analysis as UWinnipeg was one of the first universities in Canada to implement an ICR for all undergraduate students as a graduation requirement, and the initiative was Indigenous student-led, as opposed to being driven by the university’s academic leadership. This study relies on one-to-one interviews with students that led these initiatives, and a focus group session with current Indigenous students to engage their narration of the ICR. This study seeks to identify and understand student-led movements that challenge colonial legacies in higher education institutions with attention to the significance of Indigenous histories, places, and knowledge systems

Rare words in text summarization

Automatic text summarization is a difficult task, which involves a good understanding of an input text to produce fluent, brief and vast summary. The usage of text summarization models can vary from legal document summarization to news summarization. The model should be able to understand where important information is located to produce a good summary. However, infrequently used or rare words might limit model’s understanding of an input text, as the model might ignore such words or put less attention on them. Another issue is that the model accepts only a limited amount of tokens (words) of an input text, which might contain redundant information or not including important information as it is located further in the text. To address the problem of rare words, we have proposed a modification to the attention mechanism of the transformer model with pointer-generator layer, where attention mechanism receives frequency information for each word, which helps to boost rare words. Additionally, our proposed supervised learning model uses the hybrid approach incorporating both extractive and abstractive elements, to include more important information for the abstractive model in a news summarization task. We have designed experiments involving a combination of six different hybrid models with varying input text sizes (measured as tokens) to test our proposed model. Four wellknown datasets specific to news articles were used in this work: CNN/DM, XSum, Gigaword and DUC 2004 Task 1. Our results were compared using the well-known ROUGE metric. Our best model achieved R-1 score of 38.22, R-2 score of 15.07 and R-L score of 35.79, outperforming three existing models by several ROUGE points.Master of Science in Applied Computer Scienc

Pauline Scholarship and Jewish-Christian Dialogue

This thesis endeavours to make a contribution to the larger project of mutual understanding within Jewish-Christian dialogue, and in this regard, I address one issue—that of reading Paul within Judaism as a necessary element for advancing Jewish-Christian dialogue. This thesis references representative writings of Pauline scholars—leading proponents of the traditional view of Paul, the New Perspective on Paul, and that of post-New Perspective scholars—to show the relevance of Pauline scholarship to Jewish-Christian dialogue. Although this thesis is not an investigation of the historical Paul, I draw on my background in theology and interfaith dialogue to outline the views of a number of leading Pauline scholars to uncover theological issues in Pauline scholarship in order to make a case for their relevance to Jewish-Christian dialogue.Master of Arts in Theolog

Extremism and Radicalization to Violence Prevention in Manitoba: A Resource for Educators

Extremism and Radicalization to Violence Prevention in Manitoba (ERiM) is a made-in-Manitoba resource for educators. Funded by Public Safety Canada, this document was created in collaboration with educators and education stakeholders and intended for use in Manitoba schools. The purpose of this guide is to develop educator awareness, knowledge, and capacity in order to build resilience in youth and to help prevent radicalization to violence."This guide was made possible by funding from Public Safety Canada.

Physiological and Behavioural Responses of Lake Trout to Catch-And-Release Angling

Lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush), like many other native fishes in North America are a popular species typically targeted for recreational angling. Catch-and-release angling (C&R) relies on the assumption of high fish survival following release and is considered an effective way to preserve wild stocks of fish. Salmonids and other related species are susceptible to recreational angling, which can induce stress during different parts of the process (e.g., line fighting and air exposure). Other factors can impact fish health (e.g., water temperature and hooking location) and potentially lead to delayed mortality. In this thesis, I present empirical research where I used reflex impairment, physiology, and overall activity to assess the robustness of lake trout to C&R across seasons and time scales. During ice angling, lake trout experienced signs of reflex and physiological impairment up to 6 h and a high mortality rate. A key finding was that lake trout may exhibit pressure-related injuries in cooler water temperatures despite being physostomous. During open water angling, lake trout experienced barotrauma, reflex impairment, and physiological impairment immediately upon capture and 0.5 h post-angling. The addition of post-release activity monitoring via tri-axial accelerometry showed that lake trout rapidly swim to depth and exhibit reduced activity for the first 14 min after release. Collectively, I demonstrate that using multiple metrics of assessing angling-related impairment (i.e., both external and internal metrics) is necessary and future studies should not rely on one or few indices. The work presented here provides new information regarding context-specific aspects of C&R and is useful for recreational fisheries management.Manitoba Fish and Wildlife Enhancement Fund (#FES20-006), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Alliance Grant (ALLRP 562034-21), Canadian Northern Scientific Training Program (NSTP), The University of Winnipeg.Master of Science in Bioscience, Technology, and Public Polic