Lessons learned from a critical appraisal of a fall break policy in higher education: A case study

The incidence, severity and persistence of mental health issues is increasing across post- secondary campuses (Zivin et al., 2009; Canada Newswire, 2012) with these students now viewed as a high-risk population (Stallman, 2010). Many Canadian universities are implementing a policy for a fall break in hopes of alleviating students’ stress and anxiety in order to improve mental health, heighten retention, and increase academic productivity. To date, there is limited empirical evidence to guide the development of policy and the delivery of effective practices to alleviate school-related stress and anxiety. This thesis is presented as a three paper, manuscript approach. The focus of this project was to appraise the development and implementation of a fall break and then evaluate its effectiveness in an effort to address rising concerns related to mental health for post-secondary students. Three thousand and seventy-one students in years one to four completed a post-break survey during one week in January of 2013, 2014, 2015. Of those, 1019 were male and 2052 female. Thirty-three students varying in years from one to four participated in focus groups in February of 2013, 2014, 2015. Of those 4 were male and 19 were female. Ten faculty from varying faculties and one informant participated in interviews in spring, 2018. Analyses from the surveys revealed that overall, students are in favour of having a fall break. Even though a small percentage of participants perceived their workload to go up before and after the break, 90% of students agree that the fall break was useful in reducing school related stress levels. However, the focus group, faculty and informant interviews revealed that the timing of the fall break had an impact on how students and faculty experienced the break and thus influenced perceptions on the impact that the break had on student mental health. Comprehensive evidence about whether a fall break policy supports or undermines the mental health of students needs to be assessed using a range of indicators before its implementation. This will help post-secondary institutions determine whether a break in the fall semester can be an effective approach to addressing students’ stress and anxiety

Mathematical Patterns and Cognitive Architectures

Mathematical patterns are an important subclass of the class of patterns. The main task of this paper is examining a particular proposal concerning the nature of mathematical patterns and some elements of the cognitive architecture an agent should have to recognize them

Performance Modeling of Parallel Applications on MPSoCs

In this paper we present a new technique for automatically measuring the performance of tasks, functions or arbitrary parts of a program on a multiprocessor embedded system. The technique instruments the tasks described by OpenMP, used to represent the task parallelism, while ad hoc pragmas in the source indicate other pieces of code to profile. The annotations and the instrumentation are completely target-independent, so the same code can be measured on different target architectures, on simulators or on prototypes. We validate the approach on a single and on a dual LEON 3 platform synthesized on FPGA, demonstrating a low instrumentation overhead. We show how the information obtained with this technique can be easily exploited in a hardware/software design space exploration tool, by estimating, with good accuracy, the speed-up of a parallel application given the profiling on the single processor prototype

Performance Estimation for Task Graphs Combining Sequential Path Profiling and Control Dependence Regions

The speed-up estimation of parallelized code is crucial to efficiently compare different parallelization techniques or task graph transformations. Unfortunately, most of the time, during the parallelization of a specification, the information that can be extracted by profiling the corresponding sequential code (e.g. the most executed paths) are not properly taken into account. In particular, correlating sequential path profiling with the corresponding parallelized code can help in the identification of code hot spots, opening new possibilities for automatic parallelization. For this reason, starting from a well-known profiling technique, the Efficient Path Profiling, we propose a methodology that estimates the speed-up of a parallelized specification, just using the corresponding hierarchical task graph representation and the information coming from the dynamic profiling of the initial sequential specification. Experimental results show that the proposed solution outperforms existing approaches

Some tardigrades from Central Africa with the description of two new species: Macrobiotus ragonesei and M. priviterae (Eutardigrada Macrobiotidae)

Ten species of tardigrades are reported from Central Africa. Isohypsibius arbiter Binda 1980 is new for Africa; two species, Macrobiotus ragonesei and Macrobiotus priviterae are new to science. Macrobiotus ragonesei has two macroplacoids and microplacoid, and areolated eggs with conical processes sculptured in the basal portion and unsculptured in the terminal portion. Macrobiotus priviterae is similar to M. richtersi Murray 1911, M. peteri Pilato et al. 1989, and M. chieregoi Maucci et al. 1980 but differs from them by having eyes, and in the claw and egg characters; it is also similar to M. vanescens Pilato et al. 1991 and to M. danielae Pilato et al. 2001 but differs from them in claw and egg characters. The egg of Minibiotus africanus Binda & Pilato 1995, unknown so far, is described

Creativity in Conceptual Spaces

The main aim of this paper is contributing to what in the last few years has been known as computational creativity. This will be done by showing the relevance of a particular mathematical representation of G"ardenfors's conceptual spaces to the problem of modelling a phenomenon which plays a central role in producing novel and fruitful representations of perceptual patterns: analogy

A Quantum Planner for Robot Motion

The possibility of integrating quantum computation in a traditional system appears to be a viable route to drastically improve the performance of systems endowed with artificial intelligence. An example of such processing consists of implementing a teleo-reactive system employing quantum computing. In this work, we considered the navigation of a robot in an environment where its decisions are drawn from a quantum algorithm. In particular, the behavior of a robot is formalized through a production system. It is used to describe the world, the actions it can perform, and the conditions of the robot's behavior. According to the production rules, the planning of the robot activities is processed in a recognize-act cycle with a quantum rule processing algorithm. Such a system aims to achieve a significant computational speed-up

Policy Implementation in Higher Education: The Dynamics of a Fall Break

A case study using mixed methods that critically appraises the implementation of a mental health policy in higher education in the absence of evidence to inform the policy using an exemplar case from one mid-sized post-secondary institution was the motivation for this research. Explanation building was used to iteratively analyse data on rival explanations of the implementation of the fall break policy. Analyses from the surveys revealed that overall, only 36.9 per cent of students perceived an increase in workload before the break and only 29.6 per cent of students perceived an increase in workload after the break. However, the focus groups and professor interviews revealed that the timing of the fall break had an impact on how students and professors experienced the break and their perceptions on its impact on student mental health. If baseline data regarding the implementation of the fall break would have been collected prior to its implementation, we could have possibly avoided the implementation issues that arose. While this research provides an exemplar case of a fall break policy at one post-secondary institution, the policy learning is universal