COMM 19999: Essential Communication Skills

This open educational resource textbook provides Sheridan students with the foundational information and skills necessary to be successful in diploma-level programs. The book integrates customized Sheridan-centred content, including information on academic resources available on campus and customized readings that reflect the cross-disciplinary work of Sheridan programs, students, and faculty. With a focus on writing and research skills for both academic and professional contexts, the COMM 19999 course text is a valuable resource for students as they transition from post-secondary studies into their chosen fields.https://source.sheridancollege.ca/fhass_huma_book/1001/thumbnail.jp

Low Summer River Flows Associated with Low Productivity of Chinook Salmon in a Watershed with Shifting Hydrology

Climate change and human activities are transforming river flows globally, with potentially large consequences for freshwater life. To help inform watershed and flow management, there is a need for empirical studies linking flows and fish productivity. We tested the effects of river conditions and other factors on 22 years of Chinook salmon productivity in a watershed in British Columbia, Canada. Freshwater conditions during adult salmon migration and spawning, as well as during juvenile rearing, explained a large amount of variation in productivity. August river flows while salmon fry reared had the strongest effect on productivity—our model predicted that cohorts that experience 50% below average flow in the August of rearing have 21% lower productivity. These contemporary relationships are set within long-term changes in climate, land use, and hydrology. Over the last century, average August river discharge decreased by 26%, air temperatures warmed, and water withdrawals increased. Seventeen percent of the watershed was logged in the last 20 years. Our results suggest that, in order to remain stable, this Chinook salmon population being assessed for legal protection requires substantially higher August flow than previously recommended. Changing flow regimes—driven by watershed impacts and climate change—can threaten imperilled fish populations

Toward a containerized pipeline for longitudinal analysis of open-source software projects

Trust in open-source software is a cornerstone of scientific progress and a foundation of high-quality public services. Just as standards are integral when judging the efficacy of a novel pharmaceutical compound or determining the spread of a new disease, the software used to make those determinations should be useful, error-free, reliable, performant, and secure. A small bug in an application, library, or framework can lead to economic loss and even loss of life. We rely on software developers to be dynamic and responsive to user review and bug-reporting. Our team developed an open-source modular pipeline to perform empirical investigations of software quality. A key innovation of our approach is to look at projects “from a distance” similar to methods used in climate, e.g. satellite images being used to observe environmental impacts in air quality/rain forests. Instead of looking at language-specific source code features, our pipeline uses a language-agnostic high-level approach to track software quality by focusing on the development process itself, which yields great insight into the processes programmers use to write and maintain their software. Our distributed modular approach to analytics allows the pipeline to be easily extended to support additional metrics in future work. We store extracted data in an embedded SQLite database, which means that analysis can proceed without complex server setup, let alone hosting the software on dedicated servers. Our analytical modules are designed for efficiency, and future runs of our software only collect missing data, supporting the incremental analysis of known, important open-source projects

Urban planning for fishes: untangling a new project’s effects from old infrastructure and regional patterns

Urbanization has altered fish communities in many ways. However, as cities expand and redevelop, it is challenging to assess the impacts of new projects given existing alteration. We investigated how new and old infrastructure alters fish communities over a four year period in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada). We compared fish communities from a stream altered by a new rapid transit rail line and seven reference sites over four years, from before to after construction. We provide evidence that new and old projects depress the density, species richness, and diversity of fish communities. During and after construction, sections of the altered stream had one fewer species and lower density compared with pre-construction and reference streams. Streams without existing culverts had more species and greater diversity than those with culverts, but only in some years. Diversity was lower in one year of the study across all streams. We argue that most monitoring in Canada is insufficient to detect the incremental changes that new projects may cause and suggest improvements in monitoring and protecting reference streams.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author