Theses, Dissertations, and other Required Graduate Degree Essays

The reframing of international relations over the past three decades, from the nation-state to regional blocs, such as NAFTA or the European Union, was an attempt by analysts to better understand the interconnected globalized world. However, more recently, there has been a notable upsurge in nativist feeling in many parts of the world, accompanied by a renewed sense of nationalism in many nation-states. Still, regional blocs continue to be important players on the world stage in respect to trade, defence alliances, and patterns of international investment. In this regard, the importance of the supranational region is far from eclipsed and becomes an ever more present feature in international configurations. The rise of Leftist governments in Latin America over the past 19 years has led to a wave of research, not only into the reasons why so many leftist parties have been successful in the region, but also how much such successes at the state level have translated into a relatively coherent bloc of leftist policies. Some have argued that a greater cohesiveness within Latin America has resulted in a comparatively new spatial layer where the whole is more significant than the sum of its parts. Notably, a leftist turn across much of Latin America since the late 1990s has been interpreted as the attempt to deviate from (neo)liberal tendencies of the late 20th century ‘Washington Consensus’ toward more socialist policies. This thesis examines 20 of the key studies on the rise of the Left in Latin America since 1998 and analyzes the reasons they posit as being the key causes of the shift to the Left across the region. This analytical breakdown then allows for an overview of the factors that social scientists have used to examine regional political shifts, and highlights what is missing.

While recent research has generated a great deal of useful information about the nature of the stressors facing injured athletes and the coping strategies used during injury rehabilitation, few studies have examined the actual experiences of injured student athletes. This study sought to begin to address this gap in the literature by exploring the stress and coping experiences of injured student athletes over the course of their rehabilitation. Nine university student athletes with athletic injuries were recruited to complete fourteen consecutive weekly journal entries describing their stressors and coping strategies related to the injury rehabilitation process and other areas of life. Five participants (three female and two male) provided full journal datasets and then completed semi-structured interviews after returning to sport. Grounded theory methodology was utilized to analyze the journal and interview data. Themes arose related to the student athlete lifestyle, stressors, psychological responses to injury, coping strategies and coping effects, coping processes and perceived benefits. The results are discussed within the context of models of sport injury rehabilitation and previous research on stress and coping with athletic injury. The study identified several stressors and coping strategies specific to injured student athletes. These include balancing intensive time demands, which became further strained with the addition of rehabilitation, the effect of the injury on employment, and related coping strategies. Strengths and limitations of the study are addressed, and recommendations for future research are made with respect to this specific population and, more generally, research on stress and coping with athletic injury. Recommendations regarding strategies to support injured student athletes are also offered.

Assessing restoration success for pond-breeding amphibians frequently focuses on hydrology, water quality and vegetation, while neglecting the requirements of amphibians that use the restored areas for breeding. Both biotic and abiotic conditions can influence oviposition-site selection of amphibians that do not provide parental care. This study examines how vegetation structure and abiotic variables affect oviposition-site selection by amphibians. The goal of my study was to better understand the requirements of pond-breeding amphibians. In 2017, I surveyed egg masses in four ponds at the Sunshine Coast Botanical Garden in Sechelt, B.C. I identified 667 egg masses of four native amphibian species that varied in abundance and species richness among ponds. I recorded five biotic variables (i.e., vegetation cover, vegetation type, stem density, stem diameter, and canopy closure) and two abiotic variables (i.e., water depth and solar radiation) at egg-mass sites and random sites where no egg masses were detected. Logistic regression analysis with backward elimination revealed that stem count (p = 0.008) and water depth (p = 0.0001) significantly influenced oviposition-site selection. The results also showed that higher stem density and shallower water depth increased the likelihood of egg masses being present. My study indicated that quantifying stems in the water column characterized vegetation density better than estimating percent cover of vegetation. Shallow areas that have structurally complex vegetation might provide an advantage for the offspring by increasing refuge, food resources, and favourable thermal conditions for egg development. Hence, restoration projects could incorporate vegetation structure and shallow areas in their pond designs to potentially increase the abundance and diversity of amphibian communities, thereby contributing to successful restoration projects.

This study examines public policy approaches to improving accessibility to small businesses in Vancouver for people with mobility disabilities. It reviews the literature on aspects of accessibility to help determine what barriers there are. It also includes a jurisdictional scan of federal, provincial, and municipal initiatives to try to improve access to businesses. The study primarily relies on interview data since this is an emerging research topic. Based on these items, the study determines three policy options: a grant and certification program, a small business tax credit, and an education campaign. The policies are analyzed using key criteria based on the literature review and findings. I recommend starting with an education campaign in the short term to help change business attitudes about accessibility. However, all three policies can eventually be implemented.

The focus of this project is to understand the impact of the Millennial generational persona on the future of defence policy in Canada. Using focus groups and survey data, this project examines the perspectives that Millennial students have about defence issues and military organizations such as the CAF and NATO. Through this examination, it appears that Millennials are distinct from older generations on many defence issues including their evaluation and awareness of the CAF and NATO and how they understand and prioritize threats. Due to this, it is likely that the civil-military gap between civil and military society will grow as Millennials become more influential in society. Additionally, this project examines the relationship between interaction and awareness with the CAF and NATO and Millennial evaluation of these organizations. The findings suggest that interaction with the CAF and NATO has a strong impact on evaluation and awareness of military organizations.

This report examines The Healthy Fish, a branded online publication produced by Quietly Media, a content marketing company located in Vancouver, BC, and Regal Springs, a Tilapia producer headquartered in Singapore with offices in Florida, Mexico, Guatemala, Hamburg, and Indonesia. This report discusses what brought the two companies together and why they decided to create The Healthy Fish; how content strategies are created and how editorial themes and topics are chosen for the website; the process for writing stories and posting them to the website; ethical problems that can arise from having a branded publication; and what the future could look like for The Healthy Fish. It offers a full examination of what Quietly does for The Healthy Fish since becoming Regal Springs’ content marketing partner in 2015. All figures and stats are accurate as of December 2017.

This thesis addresses the need for a metaphoric understanding of religious language. However, the task to distinguish metaphoric meanings from literal ones is not always easy because all linguistic meaning, metaphoric or not, is expressed through the literal. While there has been some research that has shed light on the problem of metaphoric language and religion, no academic work has been done regarding this problem with respect to the religion of Islam. This thesis is an attempt to fill that gap. Since accounting for the comprehension of meaning is a complex endeavor, the study of metaphor lends itself naturally to philosophy. Therefore, I review two philosophical accounts, those of Paul Grice and Josef Stern before I discuss the two linguistic views of metaphor that I embrace, those being Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Relevance Theory (RT).In adopting Conceptual Metaphor Theory, I build on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s cognitive linguistics work (1980), which changed what we know about language and cognition. In terms of Relevance Theory, I draw from Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s work (1986; 2008) and Carston’s (2002; 2010) to make my argument that relevance is a pre-requisite for metaphorical understanding of religious language. Both theories proved helpful in providing a harmonious analysis. Using both these theories, I analyze an underlying Quranic metaphor, life is a test. I clarify that it is not directly stated in the Qur’an, yet Muslims use it in everyday discourse, and take it as if were literal. I argue that the concept has to be essentially metaphoric for it to be consistent with the Islamic belief of God as All-Knowing and I discuss its inferences and entailments. Since this underlying metaphor reveals the Islamic view of life and its purpose, I further examine the metaphorical nature of religious discourse, by analyzing part of a relevant religious lecture given by the spiritual consultant of Az Zahraa Islamic Centre in Richmond, British Columbia. One of the examples I analyse in this lecture utilizes the Journey domain, while another reveals the Container schema. Although both theories seem to be able to account for this Quranic metaphor, yielding the same cognitive result (CMT through domain mapping and RT through lexical adjustment), Relevance Theory was especially useful in providing the terminology to describe how I arrive at the metaphoric realization, that being “the search for relevance”. This suggests that RT has more explanatory power for understanding problematic concepts which might not seem to make sense, while CMT is well-suited for analyzing non-problematic metaphors. In the life as test metaphor, a conceptual metaphoric analysis was not even possible without the cognitive maximisation of relevance. I agree, therefore, with the scholars who argue that the two theories are not contradictory and hence should be integrated. The thesis also includes a transcription of other excerpts that are rich in poetic metaphors, with a discussion of how religious discourse contains some metaphorical expressions that stem from our embodiment and others that are merely “loosely” used.

Dengue infection is a devastating mosquito-borne disease, and the principal vector is the mosquito, Aedes aegypti. Current vector control strategies are not working, hence the need for alternative strategies. Cathepsin B is a mosquito protein that dengue viruses require to establish and replicate within mosquitoes; knocking down cathepsin B using RNAi changes the phenotype from dengue susceptible to dengue refractory in Ae. aegypti. We engineered bacteria to express dsRNA against cathepsin B to develop an orally delivered RNAi system. Our data suggest inconsistencies in the alteration of gene expression that may be a result of the modified bacteria being digested, or a lower than required quantity of the RNAi constructs being expressed. Without a consistent knockdown, it is unlikely that we will be able to reduce vector competence predictably.

Wireworms, the larval stage of click beetles, are a pest of many root crops, and are a challenge to control due to their long, subterranean life style and tolerance to chemical insecticides. An alternative approach is to target the adults. Pheromones have primarily been used as aggregants in attract-and-kill pest management tactics. However, pheromones can also alter insect movement and social interactions in other ways. I investigated whether female sex pheromone can enhance the primary transmission of the fungal pathogen Metarhizium brunneum Petch in Agriotes obscurus L. click beetles. Using video tracking, I found sex pheromone increases beetle activity regardless of season, and different light and air movement conditions. Heightened activity resulted in 58% more male-to-male contacts in a small arena. Although beetles picked up significant numbers of spores from contact with conspecifics, and an environment contaminated by conspecifics, pheromone did not enhance the level of infection obtained through these pathways.

Given a temporal weighted graph that consists of a potentially endless stream of updates, we are interested in finding density bursting subgraphs (DBS), where a DBS is a subgraph that accumulates its density at the fastest speed. Online DBS detection enjoys many novel applications. At the same time, it is challenging since the time duration of a DBS can be arbitrarily long but a limited size storage can buffer only up to a certain number of updates. To tackle this problem, we observe the critical decomposability of DBSs and show that a DBS with a large time duration can be decomposed into a set of indecomposable DBSs with equal or larger burstiness. We further prove that the time duration of an indecomposable DBS is upper bounded and propose an efficient method TopkDBSOL to detect indecomposable DBSs in an online manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of TopkDBSOL in detecting significant DBSs from temporal graphs.