Dam Removal & Safety In Canada: Creating Opportunities Through Gaps In Policy & Process

The effects of age and climate change are taking their toll on Canada's dams. These mighty structures were once the powerhouses that drove Canada's economic boom during the mid-20th century. Many industries developed after WWII required electricity and vast resources, much of which were supplied through the harnessing of water by dams. This development was preceded by the territorial evolution of Canada which played an important role in the development of provincial territories and subsequent Acts, including the navigable waters protection Act which governed waterways and the development of dams. We have now reached a time in our history where a perceptional shift in our ideas about these structures is fundamental to our safety and well-being. These once monolithic symbols of power and prosperity are now becoming an immense burden on provincial infrastructure expenses as well as safety hazards to people and the environment. Dam safety is evolving as a central focus for many provincial Ministries as they grapple with how to budget for the repairs and maintenance of these often decaying structures. Canada urgently needs an updated and cohesive nationalized system to deal with these dam safety issues. Dam removal needs to be an integral part of this new system as it offers an often less expensive and ecologically beneficial alternative. The objective of this paper is to provide recommendations to proponents of dam safety on ways to include dam removal in Canada's dam safety management framework. The recommendations I propose include an increase in funding for both dam removal projects and the provincial ministries in charge of regulating them, the creation of a more comprehensive and nationalized dam inventory and classification system, the implementation of a stream-lined dam removal program, tools for more integrated and efficient approach to prioritizing dams for removal and an accessible framework with which to track and monitor dam removal projects as well as catalogue dam incidents. Recommendations for improvement of this process will be addressed using information from the current Canadian Dam Safety (CDA) guidelines, as well as examining the current provincial Acts and legislation addressing dam safety and dam removal in Canada

A Versatile Group of Investigative Theater Practitioners: An Examination and Analysis of The Civilians

This thesis analyzes The Civilians, a New York-based theater company that creates interview-based cabaret/theater works, specifically examining the group\u27s organizational structure and creative and administrative processes. The goal of this thesis is to provide insight into how this organization functions, and the lens of organizational structure and processes is used because, as business scholars have noted, structure and process are fundamental elements of any organization. Additionally, this study is framed using Gaétan Morency and Jane Needles\u27s analysis of Cirque du Soleil, François Colbert\u27s analysis of the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, and Celia Wren\u27s article, Dissolving the Barriers, which investigates eliminating the barricades between administrative and creative realms of theater companies. Through interviews with associates of The Civilians and research of the group\u27s online presence (e.g., blogs and websites), this study finds two main themes within The Civilians\u27 organization: a strong and diverse network of collaborators, and flexibility that infuses all aspects of the organization. Individual artists and theater companies alike could use this study of The Civilians as a model for how alternative documentary theater/cabaret is produced, and artists could also use the methods described herein to create accessible, educational, and thought-provoking new work

PaPaS: A Portable, Lightweight, and Generic Framework for Parallel Parameter Studies

The current landscape of scientific research is widely based on modeling and simulation, typically with complexity in the simulation's flow of execution and parameterization properties. Execution flows are not necessarily straightforward since they may need multiple processing tasks and iterations. Furthermore, parameter and performance studies are common approaches used to characterize a simulation, often requiring traversal of a large parameter space. High-performance computers offer practical resources at the expense of users handling the setup, submission, and management of jobs. This work presents the design of PaPaS, a portable, lightweight, and generic workflow framework for conducting parallel parameter and performance studies. Workflows are defined using parameter files based on keyword-value pairs syntax, thus removing from the user the overhead of creating complex scripts to manage the workflow. A parameter set consists of any combination of environment variables, files, partial file contents, and command line arguments. PaPaS is being developed in Python 3 with support for distributed parallelization using SSH, batch systems, and C++ MPI. The PaPaS framework will run as user processes, and can be used in single/multi-node and multi-tenant computing systems. An example simulation using the BehaviorSpace tool from NetLogo and a matrix multiply using OpenMP are presented as parameter and performance studies, respectively. The results demonstrate that the PaPaS framework offers a simple method for defining and managing parameter studies, while increasing resource utilization.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, PEARC '18: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, July 22--26, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA, US

Movement and force

How – and why – do things move? How do we describe how they move? This chapter looks at ideas and activities concerning movement and force. It deals with two major issues: firstly, ideas children have about motion and the strategies for teaching about motion in the primary school program. This will include some discussion of the different contexts in which movement and force can be studied. Secondly, it looks at the wider context of studying movement and force, linking it with technology and science as a human endeavour

Quitting the Boss? The Role of Manager Influence Tactics and Employee Emotional Engagement in Voluntary Turnover

Employees commonly cite their managers’ behavior as the primary reason for quitting their jobs. We sought to extend turnover research by investigating whether two commonly used influence tactics by managers affect their employees’ voluntary turnover and whether employees’ emotional engagement and job satisfaction mediate this relationship. We tested our hypotheses using survey data collected at two time points from a sample of financial services directors and objective lagged turnover data. Using multilevel path modeling, we found that managers’ use of pressure and inspirational appeals had opposite effects on employee voluntary turnover and that employees’ emotional engagement was a significant and unique mediating mechanism even when job satisfaction, the traditional attitudinal predictor of turnover, was also included in the path model. Our findings contribute to turnover research by demonstrating a relationship between specific managerial behaviors and employee turnover and shed light on a key mediating mechanism that explains these effects

Food, fat and family: Thinking fathers through mothers' words

In targeting parenting and the family with advice on healthy eating and exercise, contemporary childhood obesity discourse draws attention to mothers as primary carers. In the process, fathers' roles and responsibilities in promoting healthy lifestyles and in family food work are neglected or silenced. This article addresses the silence surrounding fathers' participation in the feeding of their families. To do so we draw on qualitative data from an Australian Research Council-funded study investigating the impact of childhood obesity-related health messages on families. Using Carol Gilligan's (1982) notion of the ethics of care and Ann Phoenix's (2010) concept of ‘intertextuality’ and silence in the qualitative research process, we offer an ‘intertextual’ reading of mothers' presentations of fathers' involvement in family food provisioning. Mothers' accounts reveal how gender is relationally produced in the context of parental food work, with descriptions of maternal expertise, altruism and commitment to health being contrasted with stories of paternal authority, complacency and selfishness

Create MyPlate Youth Curriculum

This curriculum is divided into two sections: kindergarten through second grade and third grade through sixth grade. This curriculum was adopted by Utah’s Food $ense Program as part of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed) and was introduced and delivered to all Nutrition Education assistants and Extension agents in Utah

Understanding well-being at work: Development and validation of the eudaimonic workplace well-being scale

Given the amount of time and effort individuals pour into work, scholars and practitioners alike have spent considerable time and resources trying to understand well-being in the workplace. Unfortunately, much of the current research and measurement focuses on workplace well-being from only one perspective (i.e. hedonic well-being rather than eudaimonic well-being) or by generalizing between workplace well-being and general well-being. In this study, we sought to integrate the workplace context into the current eudaimonic perspective to develop an 8-item measure of eudaimonic workplace well-being. Using multi-wave data, we developed and validated a reliable, two-dimensional eudaimonic workplace well-being scale (EWWS). The measure replicated over seven samples and across 1346 participants and showed strong convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Furthermore, we combined EWWS with an existing measure of hedonic workplace well-being and the resulting model of overall workplace well-being explained a significant amount of variance in key organizational constructs over and above existing hedonic well-being measures. Overall, the present study suggests that the EWWS is a valuable and valid measure and, when taken together with hedonic workplace well-being, captures what it means to have a holistic sense of well-being at work