This paper is intended to inform discussions between industry and government policymakers in and beyond Ottawa, Canada about climate change and potential impacts on residential development regulations and corresponding industry practices. Ultimately, both private and public stakeholders must acknowledge the impacts of urban form on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and, conversely, the impacts of climate change on cities, for any meaningful progress on urban sustainability to ensue. Section 1 introduces the basic relationships between urban development and climate change. Urban form is directly tied to energy consumption and GHG emissions, mainly through building and transportation energy consumption. Section 2 summarizes regional changes from climate change projected by various research organizations. Projected weather changes include more severe heat waves, rain and freezing rain in the future, with flooding identified repeatedly as the main concern for the Ottawa region. Section 3 reflects on the potential impacts of more severe weather on buildings and on the building industry. Impacts may include risks to structures and workers, as well as shifting regulations and insurance liabilities. Section 4 provides an overview of changes to government environmental policies that may signal future regulatory change. And finally, Sections 5 and 6 pose questions of interest for future regulators and builders.
Wondering what the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) project has been up to for the past four years? Well you’re in luck. We just completed and submitted our SSHRC Midterm report on February 29, 2016 and it’s chock full of details about CFICE’s activities and learnings from Phase I!
Closing the Loop: Community Engaged Pedagogy in Business Courses is a CACSL and Carleton Raven’s Den-funded CFICE evaluation project that looks at the impact on Sprott School of Business’s community partners of adopting a community service learning approach to pedagogy.
Over a number of years and across a variety of courses, Sprott has implemented projects ranging in duration and topic in order to facilitate a ‘practice’ perspective for the students in Sprott’s Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of International Business programs. Sprott has received lots of feedback from students, in the form of anecdotal accounts and more structured feedback exercises, and some feedback from community partners, but mostly the latter was limited to student performance during the actual project and anticipated benefits should the organization adopt the recommendations made by the student teams. Sprott therefore undertook this study to determine the impact their CSL projects made on community partners over a longer term.
This project is still ongoing, with evaluations scheduled for the Fall/Winter term from 2016 – 2017.
Commissioned by: The School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies, Carleton University. Prepared by: Jo-Anne M. Lawless, PhD Student, School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies, Under the supervision of: Dr. Kahente Horn-Miller, Associate Professor
Abstract:
This history begins with an examination of Carleton's first acknowledgements of Indigenous peoples in their media offerings and course calendars, and follows the trajectory of academic and administrative initiatives in regard to Aboriginal programming, from the early 1940s to the present. While the report traces the ongoing efforts toward Indigenous inclusion at Carleton University, it is also a reflection of the contemporaneous social changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The study was initiated as Canada’s contribution to the Wilson’s Centre Global Women’s Leadership Initiative Women in Public Service Project initiated by Hilary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. In partnership with the Centre for Women in Politics and Public Leadership, Gender Equality Measurement Initiative, and Centre for Research on Women and Work at Carleton University and the Public Service Commission of Canada.
Abstract:
This study was undertaken to determine whether women in leadership positions in the Canadian federal Public Service (PS) have had an impact on policy, programs, operations, administration or workplace conditions, what that impact might be, and how to measure it. Drawing from qualitative interviews with current and retired Executives and Deputy Ministers in the Canadian federal public service, it provides recommendations and considerations around gender and impact moving forward.
The Iowa Gamb
ling Task (IGT) is widely used to assess the role of
emotion in decision making. However, there is only indirect
evidence to support that the task measures emotion. There are
inconsistencies in performance within in healthy populations who
display risk tak
ing traits. Two hundred and fifty participants were
assessed for psychopathy, sensation seeking, and impulsiveness.
The IGT was compared with modified versions that directly
manipulated emotion within in the task by indexing reward and
punishment cards wit
h images varying in emotional content.
Participants continued to learn to avoid risky decks in all versions
of the IGT. The manipulation of emotional content within the task
did affect performance: fearful images contributed to greater risky
deck selection
s. Across the tasks, psychopathy showed the
strongest relationship to risky deck selections, and lower levels of
psychopathy was associated decreased risky deck selections.
However, psychopathy did not affect learning in the modified
versions. Exploratory analysis on image valance found that
negative images (compared to neutral) benefited learning for
individuals with higher levels of psychopathy. Discussion will
center on the benefits of manipulating emotion directly within the
task as a means to assess th
e validity of the IGT.
The debate surrounding how emotion and c
ognition
are
organized in the brain often lead
s to
Damasio’s Somatic
Marker Hypothesis. This theory endorses a highly interactive
process between emotion and cognition, but has been
criticized for being too broad to capture the specific links
between the t
wo. It also implies that emotion operates from a
neural architecture that is dissociable from cognition.
Although empirical findings from the Iowa Gambling Task
lend support for the theory, this can promote a false
dichotomy between emotion and cognition. Issues will be
raised regarding
the
view
that the theory and the task are ill
-
formulated to account for the phases of decision making.
Further theoretical work may be required to align the task
with Damasio’s view of emotion as integrated with cognition.