MacKinley Ryce Donaldson Senior Interior Design Exhibit 2015

Most people consider Interior Design to be a luxury and something that only the wealthy and privileged can afford. However, this is not the case; anyone with any budget can have a space that they are proud to call their own. While the wealthy do have the ability to pay to furnish a room without regard to cost, which is not a criteria that alone determines whether or not you have a wonderful space. A more economical family may have to be more prudent with their furnishings purchases, but they still have the right to a beautiful, enjoyable, comfortable home. They may have to consider reupholstering a sofa as opposed to a buying brand new. So long as people come to the design process with an open mind there is no way that they shouldn’t be able to create a space they love. There are so many options when it comes to furniture for a space, whether that is brand new piece of furniture, a hand me down from family, a piece that needed some love and elbow grease to restore, or something completely reimagined and reworked into something unique and one of a kind. Commercial Design can be approached in a similar manner as well, although with restrictions. Commercial Design has more codes and safety standards to consider that guide and sometime limit choices made by designers and businesses. However, there is a wide selection of furniture offered at a variety of prices suitable for most businesses, and most budgets. No one should feel they are unable to obtain a beautiful area or space that they can be proud of regardless of whether it is a Commercial or Residential design

Captain death strikes again: tuberculosis and the Stó:lõ 1871-1907

Tuberculosis has cast a long shadow on the history of Native-Newcomers relations in the Pacific Northwest. Malicious and deadly, it has dramatically affected the lives of thousands of Aboriginal people and become a permanent part of life in Stó:lõ communities. However, its history, especially the period 1871-1907, has been underrepresented in historical scholarship. Due to perceived scarcity of available quantitative information, scholars in general have paid little attention to tuberculosis, focusing instead on the early contact period, the sanatorium period that began in British Columbia in 1907, or on another disease altogether, usually smallpox. Moreover, when tuberculosis has been studied, it has been approached as a disease within a western bio-medical perspective. In contrast to much of this historiography, this thesis examines tuberculosis more holistically as an illness best understood culturally, as it has been experienced by communities as well as by the individual. Through story and song as well as a thorough reading of familiar government records under a different lens, this thesis engages the perceptions and understandings of both Aboriginal people and Euro-Canadians, patients and government agents, to produce a more balanced, meaningful, and culturally reflexive understanding of the history of tuberculosis. Following a historiographical discussion in the introduction, chapter two explores Stó:lõ oral archival sources to engage Stó:lõ people’s perspective of tuberculosis and illness. These stories and songs, generated by Stó:lõ people themselves, demonstrate the profound influence that tuberculosis has had on Stó:lõ communities throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. With this new framework in mind, chapter three re-examines the historical record and specifically government documents created by the Department of Indian Affairs and other preceding agencies. This more holistic interpretation of tuberculosis reveals that rather than alleviating the severity and prevalence of tuberculosis in Stó:lõ communities, certain DIA initiatives likely exasperated its affects. By thus addressing the historiographical gap in tuberculosis literature and by generating a more meaningful, balanced, and culturally reflexive analysis of the history of tuberculosis among the Stó:lõ, this thesis contributes to Canadian medical history, the history of Native-Newcomer relations, and the history of the Stó:lõ people

Is the Association Between Education and Cognitive Resilience Modified by Brain Weight and Cortical Atrophy?

Introduction: Some individuals are able to avoid reaching the threshold for clinical dementia despite the presence of Alzheimer neuropathology. This disparity between the neuropathologic and clinical symptoms required for a diagnosis of AD is often attributed to cognitive resilience, defined in the current study as the combined influence of brain reserve and cognitive reserve. This study assessed how educational attainment (a common measure of cognitive reserve), as well as brain weight and cortical atrophy (measures of brain reserve), may influence the outcome of cognitive resilience independently or through interactions with each other. Methods: Analyses were based on the Nun Study, a longitudinal study of aging in 678 participants aged 75+ years at baseline. Educational attainment data were available through convent archives while brain weight and cortical atrophy data were collected through post mortem autopsies. Alzheimer neuropathology was assessed through post mortem autopsies and was defined using the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer’s Disease (CERAD) and National Institute on Aging and Reagan Institute (NIA-RI) neuropathologic criteria. Finally, dementia status was determined through annual cognitive testing using DSM-IV criteria. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to assess all associations between exposures (educational attainment, brain weight and cortical atrophy) and the outcome (cognitive resilience), controlling for participant age at the time of death and the presence of apolipoprotein E-ε4. Results: Higher educational attainment and brain weight, and the absence of cortical atrophy were all positively associated with cognitive resilience defined using both CERAD and NIA-RI neuropathologic criteria. However, the negative association between cortical atrophy and cognitive resilience was significant only when brain weights were high. When brain weight and educational attainment were assessed in the same models, the influence of educational attainment fell below statistical significance. Finally, when educational attainment was assessed in models stratified by cortical atrophy status, it remained significant only in the presence of mild atrophy. Discussion: It was hypothesized that higher educational attainment, higher brain weight and the absence of cortical atrophy would all be positively associated with cognitive resilience. These hypotheses were supported by findings in the study. Further, it was hypothesized that the impacts of mild atrophy would be more significant among individuals with lower brain weights than among those with higher brain weights, as higher brain weight would act as a buffer against mild atrophy. However, findings were contrary to this hypothesis, with results suggesting that atrophy was only significant when brain weights were high. This non-significant effect is likely partially related to low statistical power in the low brain weight strata. However, this result may additionally be the result of a floor effect whereby low brain weight depletes brain reserve to such an extent that further loss in tissue (through cortical atrophy) is unlikely to result in further impairment. Finally, it was hypothesized that educational attainment would be most strongly associated with cognitive resilience when brain reserve was low (i.e., in the presence of cortical atrophy or low brain weight). This hypothesis was partially supported by findings indicating that when mild atrophy was present, low educational attainment was associated with reduced odds of resilience. Overall, it appears that cognitive reserve factors (educational attainment) are important in reducing the clinical symptoms of AD in late life; however, these positive effects were only found when threats to brain reserve (cortical atrophy, low brain weight) were absent or of mild severity. Conclusion: Higher levels of education can improve cognitive reserve and help reduce the risk of dementia symptoms despite AD brain changes. These benefits are only realized, however, when low brain weight and cortical atrophy are avoided. This study and future efforts aimed at better understanding how late-life cognitive resilience is influenced by factors from across the lifespan could inform applications of cognitive resilience theory to clinical and community settings with the goal of offsetting the devastating impacts of AD

UNDERSTANDING THE MOTIVATIONS AND EXPERIENCES OF TEACHERS WHO CHANGE SCHOOLS

Teacher attrition is a challenge that has plagued our public school system for nearly a century. While attrition rates have consistently risen over the past 30 years, the cost of teacher turnover has moved beyond finances, negatively impacting student achievement and disrupting faculty cohesion and collaboration. In an attempt to address the growing concern of teacher retention and attrition, literature has focused on quantifying the factors that impact these areas of concern. This case study examined the motivations and experiences of seven veteran teachers who engaged in voluntary mobility, each choosing to leave the school in which they were heavily invested and move to a new school. In order to more clearly identify the factors that impacted each participants’ motivations and experiences, the data were examined through a lens of person-environment fit theory. Findings for this case study include participants’ motivations to move being impacted by person-environment fit at the person-organization, person-group, and person-individual levels of fit, while participants’ experiences in their new schools manifested in all levels of person-environment fit, including person-vocation, person-job, person-organization, person-group, and person-individual levels of fit. Further, these levels of fit do not exist in isolation of one another, but rather are deeply integrated and interdependent. However, individuals vary in their expectations of their work environment, which directly impacts their tolerance for stress at each level of fit within that environment

Enhancing Undergraduate Labs for Experiential Learning Can we design labs to better teach employable skills in core mechanical engineering courses?

The learning laboratory is a common and important component of contemporary Canadian post-secondary engineering education, intended to relate practice and theory, provide a practical experience in what can be a largely theoretical program, and motivate students. However, a significant minority of mechanical and manufacturing engineering students in a third-year materials science course at the University of Calgary have, across the last decade, reported on their end-of-course surveys that they do not perceive any connections between their laboratories and either their careers or their lectures. Simultaneously, there have been calls from local industry, the provincial government of Alberta that regulates and funds the program, and University administration for more experiential opportunities to be included in undergraduate programs to better prepare students for their future employment. Given that engineering education is directly related to professional engineering practice, it is key that students perceive connections between their program and industrial applications. Therefore, the research question is, how can established educational scholarship be applied to undergraduate engineering laboratories in order to improve students’ perception of their learning experience? Established educational scholarship and expectations from the Government of Alberta and the University of Calgary were reviewed. Qualitative surveys were developed using this scholarship and released to University of Calgary students currently enrolled in the third-year materials science course, asking them to identify and assess learning levels in their laboratories past and present and how course actions affected their assessment. A second series of surveys was released to members of local engineering industry with experience managing students and graduates of the University program, identifying what value they see in engineering learning laboratories. Analysis of results and scholarship provided a set of recommendations for improving the student laboratory learning experience. The core principles of these recommendations are to communicate clearly and explicitly with students, to constructively align all components of the laboratory experience, and to include hands-on participatory experiences whenever possible. Further recommendations targeted implementation of these principles in the laboratory pedagogy, within the laboratory itself as experienced by students, in the laboratory assessment, and in laboratory facilitators such as teaching assistants and technicians

Deviant cortical sulcation related to schizophrenia and cognitive deficits in the second trimester

Aberrant cortical development, inferred from cortical folding, is linked to the risk of schizophrenia. Cortical folds develop in a time-locked fashion during fetal growth. We leveraged this temporal specificity of sulcation to investigate the timing of the prenatal insult linked to schizophrenia and the cognitive impairment seen in this illness. Anatomical MRI scans from 68 patients with schizophrenia and 72 controls were used to evaluate the sulcal depth of five major invariable primary sulci representing lobar development (calcarine sulcus, superior temporal sulcus, superior frontal sulcus, intraparietal sulcus and inferior frontal sulcus) with formation representing the distinct developmental periods. A repeated-measure ANOVA with five sulci and two hemispheres as the within-subject factors and gender, age and intracranial volume as covariates revealed a significant effect of diagnosis (F[1,134] = 14.8, p = 0.0002). Control subjects had deeper bilateral superior temporal, right inferior frontal and left calcarine sulci. A deeper superior frontal sulcus predicted better cognitive scores among patients. Our results suggest that the gestational disruption underlying schizophrenia is likely to predate, if not coincide with the appearance of calcarine sulcus (early second trimester). Nevertheless, the burden of cognitive deficits may relate specifically to the aberrant superior frontal development apparent in late second trimester

The trajectory of putative astroglial dysfunction in first episode schizophrenia: a longitudinal 7-Tesla MRS study

Myo-inositol is mainly found in astroglia and its levels has been shown to be reduced in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of patients with schizophrenia. We investigate the status of astroglial integrity indexed by ACC myo-inositol at the onset and over the first 6 months of treatment of first episode schizophrenia. We employed 7 T magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) and quantified myo-inositol spectra at the dorsal ACC in 31 participants; 21 patients with schizophrenia with median lifetime antipsychotic exposure of less than 3 days, followed up after 6 months of treatment, and 10 healthy subjects scanned twice over the same period. We studied the time by group interaction for myo-inositol after adjusting for gender and age. We report significant reduction in myo-inositol concentration in the ACC in schizophrenia at an early, untreated state of acute illness that becomes insignificant over time, after instituting early intervention. This trajectory indicates that dynamic astroglial changes are likely to operate in the early stages of schizophrenia. MRS myo-inositol may be a critical marker of amelioration of active psychosis in early stages of schizophrenia

Early treatment response in first episode psychosis: a 7-T magnetic resonance spectroscopic study of glutathione and glutamate

Early response to antipsychotic medications is one of the most important determinants of later symptomatic and functional outcomes in psychosis. Glutathione and glutamate have emerged as promising therapeutic targets for patients demonstrating inadequate response to dopamine-blocking antipsychotics. Nevertheless, the role of these neurochemicals in the mechanism of early antipsychotic response remains poorly understood. Using a longitudinal design and ultrahigh field 7-T magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) protocol in 53 subjects, we report the association between dorsal anterior cingulate cortex glutamate and glutathione, with time to treatment response in drug naive (34.6% of the sample) or minimally medicated first episode patients with schizophreniform disorder, schizophrenia, and schizoaffective disorder. Time to response was defined as the number of weeks required to reach a 50% reduction in the PANSS-8 scores. Higher glutathione was associated with shorter time to response (F = 4.86, P = 0.017), while higher glutamate was associated with more severe functional impairment (F = 5.33, P = 0.008). There were no significant differences between patients and controls on measures of glutamate or glutathione. For the first time, we have demonstrated an association between higher glutathione and favorable prognosis in FEP. We propose that interventions that increase brain glutathione levels may improve outcomes of early intervention in psychosis

Progressive Changes in Glutamate Concentration in Early Stages of Schizophrenia: A Longitudinal 7-Tesla MRS Study

Progressive reduction in glutamatergic transmission has been proposed as an important component of the illness trajectory of schizophrenia. Despite its popularity, to date, this notion has not been convincingly tested in patients in early stages of schizophrenia. In a longitudinal 7T magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS), we quantified glutamate at the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in 21 participants with a median lifetime antipsychotic exposure of less than 3 days and followed them up after 6 months of treatment. Ten healthy controls were also scanned at 2 time points. While patients had significantly lower overall glutamate levels than healthy controls (F(1,27) = 5.23, P = .03), we did not observe a progressive change of glutamate concentration in patients (F(1,18) = 0.47, P = .50), and the group by time interaction was not significant (F(1,27) = 0.86, P = .36). On average, patients with early psychosis receiving treatment showed a 0.02 mM/y increase, while healthy controls showed a 0.06 mM/y reduction of MRS glutamate levels. Bayesian analysis of our observations does not support early, post-onset glutamate loss in schizophrenia. Interestingly, it provides evidence in favor of a lack of progressive glutamate change in our schizophrenia sample—indicating that the glutamate level at the onset of illness was the best predictor of the levels 6 months after treatment. A more nuanced view of glutamatergic physiology, linked to early cortical maturation, may be required to understand glutamate-mediated dynamics in schizophrenia