612 research outputs found

    Trans and non-binary people’s experiences of cancer care in Aotearoa/New Zealand

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    Cancer is a severe and life-threatening disease affecting many people and their loved ones. Much is still unknown about cancer as a disease; however, it is known that the care that patients receive can play a vital role in producing better illness outcomes and improving quality of life during treatment. Understanding people’s experiences of cancer care is important for creating better care protocols, understanding barriers to care access, and ensuring patients receive care that meets their needs. This thesis explores the gap in knowledge surrounding trans and non-binary (TNB) people’s experiences of cancer care in Aotearoa/New Zealand. There is limited cancer research internationally regarding TNB communities and cancer, and little-to-no known research has been published specific to Aotearoa/New Zealand. The research question of this study was, what are the cancer care experiences of TNB people in Aotearoa/New Zealand? To understand this question, I undertook an interpretive qualitative study theoretically informed by community psychology. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with three participants who identified as trans or non-binary and had received treatment in Aotearoa/New Zealand within the last ten years. A narrative case study approach was utilised, in order for the complexity and diversity of each participant’s experiences to be recognised. It was found that TNB people experience barriers in accessing cancer care and receiving quality cancer care. These barriers are related to wider structural issues resulting from cisgenderism that are reflected within cancer care. Cisgenderism acts to constrain how TNB patients define their own narrative of illness and interrupts the ability to move forward through cancer in ways that are personally meaningful. The study also found that TNB people are not passive in the face of constraint, as the participants each found ways to maintain a sense of agency within their experience of cancer care. There was significant diversity within the participants’ experiences, which was an important finding in-itself. This diversity particularly demonstrated the benefit of a methodological approach that could account for complexity and intersectionality, when seeking to understand TNB people’s experiences of cancer care. Overall, this thesis provides new insight into an underexplored topic and has important implications for TNB cancer patients in Aotearoa/New Zealand

    University of Windsor Graduate Calendar 2023 Spring

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    https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/universitywindsorgraduatecalendars/1027/thumbnail.jp

    University of Windsor Graduate Calendar 2023 Winter

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    https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/universitywindsorgraduatecalendars/1026/thumbnail.jp

    Metaverse. Old urban issues in new virtual cities

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    Recent years have seen the arise of some early attempts to build virtual cities, utopias or affective dystopias in an embodied Internet, which in some respects appear to be the ultimate expression of the neoliberal city paradigma (even if virtual). Although there is an extensive disciplinary literature on the relationship between planning and virtual or augmented reality linked mainly to the gaming industry, this often avoids design and value issues. The observation of some of these early experiences - Decentraland, Minecraft, Liberland Metaverse, to name a few - poses important questions and problems that are gradually becoming inescapable for designers and urban planners, and allows us to make some partial considerations on the risks and potentialities of these early virtual cities

    ACARORUM CATALOGUS IX. Acariformes, Acaridida, Schizoglyphoidea (Schizoglyphidae), Histiostomatoidea (Histiostomatidae, Guanolichidae), Canestrinioidea (Canestriniidae, Chetochelacaridae, Lophonotacaridae, Heterocoptidae), Hemisarcoptoidea (Chaetodactylidae, Hyadesiidae, Algophagidae, Hemisarcoptidae, Carpoglyphidae, Winterschmidtiidae)

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    The 9th volume of the series Acarorum Catalogus contains lists of mites of 13 families, 225 genera and 1268 species of the superfamilies Schizoglyphoidea, Histiostomatoidea, Canestrinioidea and Hemisarcoptoidea. Most of these mites live on insects or other animals (as parasites, phoretic or commensals), some inhabit rotten plant material, dung or fungi. Mites of the families Chetochelacaridae and Lophonotacaridae are specialised to live with Myriapods (Diplopoda). The peculiar aquatic or intertidal mites of the families Hyadesidae and Algophagidae are also included.Publishe

    Contextualizing Premodern Philosophy

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    This volume brings together contributions from distinguished scholars in the history of philosophy, focusing on points of interaction between discrete historical contexts, religions, and cultures found within the premodern period. The contributions connect thinkers from antiquity through the Middle Ages and include philosophers from the three major monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. By emphasizing premodern philosophy’s shared textual roots in antiquity, particularly the writings of Plato and Aristotle, the volume highlights points of cross-pollination between different schools, cultures, and moments in premodern thought. Approaching the complex history of the premodern world in an accessible way, the editors organize the volume so as to underscore the difficulties the premodern period poses for scholars, while accentuating the fascinating interplay between the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin philosophical traditions. The contributors cover many topics ranging from the aims of Aristotle’s cosmos, the adoption of Aristotle’s Organon by al-Fārābī, and the origins of the Plotiniana Arabica to the role of Ibn Gabirol’s Fons vitae in the Latin West, the ways in which Islamic philosophy shaped thirteenth-century Latin conceptions of light, Roger Bacon’s adaptation of Avicenna for use in his moral philosophy, and beyond. The volume’s focus on ""source-based contextualism"" demonstrates an appreciation for the rich diversity of thought found in the premodern period, while revealing methodological challenges raised by the historical study of premodern philosophy. Contextualizing Premodern Philosophy: Explorations of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin Traditions is a stimulating resource for scholars and advanced students working in the history of premodern philosophy

    Database System Acceleration on FPGAs

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    Relational database systems provide various services and applications with an efficient means for storing, processing, and retrieving their data. The performance of these systems has a direct impact on the quality of service of the applications that rely on them. Therefore, it is crucial that database systems are able to adapt and grow in tandem with the demands of these applications, ensuring that their performance scales accordingly. In the past, Moore's law and algorithmic advancements have been sufficient to meet these demands. However, with the slowdown of Moore's law, researchers have begun exploring alternative methods, such as application-specific technologies, to satisfy the more challenging performance requirements. One such technology is field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which provide ideal platforms for developing and running custom architectures for accelerating database systems. The goal of this thesis is to develop a domain-specific architecture that can enhance the performance of in-memory database systems when executing analytical queries. Our research is guided by a combination of academic and industrial requirements that seek to strike a balance between generality and performance. The former ensures that our platform can be used to process a diverse range of workloads, while the latter makes it an attractive solution for high-performance use cases. Throughout this thesis, we present the development of a system-on-chip for database system acceleration that meets our requirements. The resulting architecture, called CbMSMK, is capable of processing the projection, sort, aggregation, and equi-join database operators and can also run some complex TPC-H queries. CbMSMK employs a shared sort-merge pipeline for executing all these operators, which results in an efficient use of FPGA resources. This approach enables the instantiation of multiple acceleration cores on the FPGA, allowing it to serve multiple clients simultaneously. CbMSMK can process both arbitrarily deep and wide tables efficiently. The former is achieved through the use of the sort-merge algorithm which utilizes the FPGA RAM for buffering intermediate sort results. The latter is achieved through the use of KeRRaS, a novel variant of the forward radix sort algorithm introduced in this thesis. KeRRaS allows CbMSMK to process a table a few columns at a time, incrementally generating the final result through multiple iterations. Given that acceleration is a key objective of our work, CbMSMK benefits from many performance optimizations. For instance, multi-way merging is employed to reduce the number of merge passes required for the execution of the sort-merge algorithm, thus improving the performance of all our pipeline-breaking operators. Another example is our in-depth analysis of early aggregation, which led to the development of a novel cache-based algorithm that significantly enhances aggregation performance. Our experiments demonstrate that CbMSMK performs on average 5 times faster than the state-of-the-art CPU-based database management system MonetDB.:I Database Systems & FPGAs 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Databases & the Importance of Performance 1.2 Accelerators & FPGAs 1.3 Requirements 1.4 Outline & Summary of Contributions 2 BACKGROUND ON DATABASE SYSTEMS 2.1 Databases 2.1.1 Storage Model 2.1.2 Storage Medium 2.2 Database Operators 2.2.1 Projection 2.2.2 Filter 2.2.3 Sort 2.2.4 Aggregation 2.2.5 Join 2.2.6 Operator Classification 2.3 Database Queries 2.4 Impact of Acceleration 3 BACKGROUND ON FPGAS 3.1 FPGA 3.1.1 Logic Element 3.1.2 Block RAM (BRAM) 3.1.3 Digital Signal Processor (DSP) 3.1.4 IO Element 3.1.5 Programmable Interconnect 3.2 FPGADesignFlow 3.2.1 Specifications 3.2.2 RTL Description 3.2.3 Verification 3.2.4 Synthesis, Mapping, Placement, and Routing 3.2.5 TimingAnalysis 3.2.6 Bitstream Generation and FPGA Programming 3.3 Implementation Quality Metrics 3.4 FPGA Cards 3.5 Benefits of Using FPGAs 3.6 Challenges of Using FPGAs 4 RELATED WORK 4.1 Summary of Related Work 4.2 Platform Type 4.2.1 Accelerator Card 4.2.2 Coprocessor 4.2.3 Smart Storage 4.2.4 Network Processor 4.3 Implementation 4.3.1 Loop-based implementation 4.3.2 Sort-based Implementation 4.3.3 Hash-based Implementation 4.3.4 Mixed Implementation 4.4 A Note on Quantitative Performance Comparisons II Cache-Based Morphing Sort-Merge with KeRRaS (CbMSMK) 5 OBJECTIVES AND ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW 5.1 From Requirements to Objectives 5.2 Architecture Overview 5.3 Outlineof Part II 6 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF OPENCL AND RTL FOR SORT-MERGE PRIMITIVES ON FPGAS 6.1 Programming FPGAs 6.2 RelatedWork 6.3 Architecture 6.3.1 Global Architecture 6.3.2 Sorter Architecture 6.3.3 Merger Architecture 6.3.4 Scalability and Resource Adaptability 6.4 Experiments 6.4.1 OpenCL Sort-Merge Implementation 6.4.2 RTLSorters 6.4.3 RTLMergers 6.4.4 Hybrid OpenCL-RTL Sort-Merge Implementation 6.5 Summary & Discussion 7 RESOURCE-EFFICIENT ACCELERATION OF PIPELINE-BREAKING DATABASE OPERATORS ON FPGAS 7.1 The Case for Resource Efficiency 7.2 Related Work 7.3 Architecture 7.3.1 Sorters 7.3.2 Sort-Network 7.3.3 X:Y Mergers 7.3.4 Merge-Network 7.3.5 Join Materialiser (JoinMat) 7.4 Experiments 7.4.1 Experimental Setup 7.4.2 Implementation Description & Tuning 7.4.3 Sort Benchmarks 7.4.4 Aggregation Benchmarks 7.4.5 Join Benchmarks 7. Summary 8 KERRAS: COLUMN-ORIENTED WIDE TABLE PROCESSING ON FPGAS 8.1 The Scope of Database System Accelerators 8.2 Related Work 8.3 Key-Reduce Radix Sort(KeRRaS) 8.3.1 Time Complexity 8.3.2 Space Complexity (Memory Utilization) 8.3.3 Discussion and Optimizations 8.4 Architecture 8.4.1 MSM 8.4.2 MSMK: Extending MSM with KeRRaS 8.4.3 Payload, Aggregation and Join Processing 8.4.4 Limitations 8.5 Experiments 8.5.1 Experimental Setup 8.5.2 Datasets 8.5.3 MSMK vs. MSM 8.5.4 Payload-Less Benchmarks 8.5.5 Payload-Based Benchmarks 8.5.6 Flexibility 8.6 Summary 9 A STUDY OF EARLY AGGREGATION IN DATABASE QUERY PROCESSING ON FPGAS 9.1 Early Aggregation 9.2 Background & Related Work 9.2.1 Sort-Based Early Aggregation 9.2.2 Cache-Based Early Aggregation 9.3 Simulations 9.3.1 Datasets 9.3.2 Metrics 9.3.3 Sort-Based Versus Cache-Based Early Aggregation 9.3.4 Comparison of Set-Associative Caches 9.3.5 Comparison of Cache Structures 9.3.6 Comparison of Replacement Policies 9.3.7 Cache Selection Methodology 9.4 Cache System Architecture 9.4.1 Window Aggregator 9.4.2 Compressor & Hasher 9.4.3 Collision Detector 9.4.4 Collision Resolver 9.4.5 Cache 9.5 Experiments 9.5.1 Experimental Setup 9.5.2 Resource Utilization and Parameter Tuning 9.5.3 Datasets 9.5.4 Benchmarks on Synthetic Data 9.5.5 Benchmarks on Real Data 9.6 Summary 10 THE FULL PICTURE 10.1 System Architecture 10.2 Benchmarks 10.3 Meeting the Objectives III Conclusion 11 SUMMARY AND OUTLOOK ON FUTURE RESEARCH 11.1 Summary 11.2 Future Work BIBLIOGRAPHY LIST OF FIGURES LIST OF TABLE

    Aggregating over Dominated Points by Sorting, Scanning, Zip and Flat Maps

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    Prefix aggregation operation (also called scan), and its particular case, prefix summation, is an important parallel primitive and enjoys a lot of attention in the research literature. It is also used in many algorithms as one of the steps. Aggregation over dominated points in ?^m is a multidimensional generalisation of prefix aggregation. It is also intensively researched, both as a parallel primitive and as a practical problem, encountered in computational geometry, spatial databases and data warehouses. In this paper we show that, for a constant dimension m, aggregation over dominated points in ?^m can be computed by O(1) basic operations that include sorting the whole dataset, zipping sorted lists of elements, computing prefix aggregations of lists of elements and flat maps, which expand the data size from initial n to n log^{m-1}n. Thereby we establish that prefix aggregation suffices to express aggregation over dominated points in more dimensions, even though the latter is a far-reaching generalisation of the former. Many problems known to be expressible by aggregation over dominated points become expressible by prefix aggregation, too. We rely on a small set of primitive operations which guarantee an easy transfer to various distributed architectures and some desired properties of the implementation

    Research into Early-Stage Identification of Entrepreneurs and Innovators with Development of an Identification Guidance Framework

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    In recent years, young entrepreneurs have attracted considerable interest from Government policy makers and the media and the evidence and general consensus of opinion is that the numbers of young people aspiring to start their own businesses is increasing. Courses are being created for further and higher education as well as modules developed at schools to introduce young people to business studies, however not everyone is suited to the courses, and those who undertake them may never go on to realise their aspirations of having a successful business. Entrepreneurs and innovators are crucial for society in order to develop new businesses, products and services, thus creating job prospects and wealth for the country and society as a whole. Many entrepreneurs don’t become entrepreneurs until later in life, or their skills and attributes never materialise and lie dormant due to factors such as financial insecurity, lack of confidence or guidance as to how they can control their destiny. It is believed that entrepreneurship can be, to a certain extent taught, but only successfully, to individuals who have entrepreneurial traits and who have been identified as being entrepreneurial. Previous studies have mainly focused on existing entrepreneurs and those with failed businesses. By contrast this thesis seeks to identify the traits and characteristics that make individuals entrepreneurs, with a view to devising a framework of identifiable indicators for the tertiary education age group of 16 - 18 years old, leading potentially to early-stage identification of entrepreneurs. Leading on from the validated identification framework, online software tools have been developed as a user age-appropriate interface that will be suitable for providing the necessary identification of entrepreneurs in the 16-18 age groups. This study provides a further opportunity for additional research into the development of entrepreneur mentoring and training guidelines that can assist in preparing the potential entrepreneurs for their future by giving them tutorial programmes to develop their businesses successfully. This research programme seeks to establish a paradigm as to what it is that makes someone entrepreneurial, primarily focussed on positively identifying traits exhibited by existing entrepreneurs which can be used to assist in that identification process. As part of the research work completed so far, these traits have now been identified and have expanded upon the limited number of traits previously recognised as being entrepreneurial. A new derivation for an Entrepreneurial Trait has been created which shall be known as an ‘Entrephonotypic Trait’ which is a grouping of specifically recognised traits which have been found to be common to entrepreneurs. In addition to the research new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality have been evaluated for integration and use in training programs to assist the development of young entrepreneurs who have the potential to become successful in their business ventures. This thesis makes a significant contribution to knowledge which can be further expanded upon and utilised in future studies and research
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