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- Resource Type:
- Report
- Creator:
- Morris, Marika
- Description:
- 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.
- Date Created:
- 2016-06-22
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- Resource Type:
- Report
- Creator:
- Mount, Phil and Knezevic, Irena
- Abstract:
- REPORT HIGHLIGHTS - Opportunity for on-site food production comes from public and political support for ‘local food’, combined with a shortage of land for new producers - GIS study of Ontario healthcare properties shows 217 with more than one acre of arable land available, and 54 with more than five acres - Case studies demonstrate the benefits of a ‘farmer’— independent, staff member or community group—and/or labour force dedicated to the project - Initial and on-going viability correlates to the extent of institutional support, particularly staff time for project coordination - Institutional motivations for on-site food production initiatives vary, include mental and physical therapeutic benefits See more at the Project SOIL website.
- Date Created:
- 2015-09-30
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- Resource Type:
- Report
- Creator:
- Daw, Jamie R., Mintzes, Barbara, Morgan, Steven G., Gagnon, Marc-André, Martin, Danielle, and Lexchin, Joel
- Date Created:
- 2015-07-15
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- Resource Type:
- Report
- Creator:
- Duxbury, Linda E. and Bennell, Craig
- Abstract:
- Police in schools In an era where the costs of policing are constantly under scrutiny from governing municipalities, the time has come for police agencies to re-evaluate the services they provide. To do this, they need to answer questions relating to the value that different activities they perform create in the communities they serve. In other words, they need to change the focus of the conversation from “what does this service cost” to “what value does this service provide.” This document summarizes key findings from a longitudinal (2014-2017), multi-method (quantitative, qualitative, and ethnographic analysis, along with a Social Return on Investment [SROI] analysis) case study undertaken to identify the value of School Resource Officers (SROs) that are employed by Peel Regional Police and work in the service’s Neighborhood Police Unit (NPU). Of note is the application of SROI techniques in this evaluation process. SROI, a methodology that emerged from the not-for-profit sector, helps researchers identify sources of value outside of those considered through traditional valuation techniques, such as cost-benefit analysis. Evaluation of Peel Police’s SRO program was motivated by a number of factors. First, the costs of this program are both easy to identify and significant (just over $9 million per year). Second, it is very challenging to identify the value that this program provides to students and the community. The challenges of quantifying the value offered by assigning full-time SROs to Canadian high schools is evidenced by the fact that such programs are rare, as police services around the world have responded to pressures to economize by removing officers from schools and either eliminating the role of the SRO or having one officer attend to many schools.
- Date Created:
- 2018-01-10
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- Resource Type:
- Report
- Creator:
- Yisa, Felix
- Abstract:
- My study attempted to find out if the old part of our brain (limbic system) had a significant role in influencing how we detect the valence of blurry words without conscious awareness of what the words are. 10 participants were shown blurry words that could not be read and were asked to guess valence, without a time limit. The hypotheses for this study was that participants would be accurate in detecting valence of blurred words and that participants would rate negative words the most accurately. I also predicted that participants would attempt to read words before rating valence and they would attempt to read the words only in the beginning. The stimuli were shown to the participants on printed-paper. There were 10 blurred words per page with accompanying 5-point Likert scales by each blurred word with a reference scale at the top of every page. My research data found that there was a significant statistical difference between people’s ability to detect the valence of blurred words compared to the normal ability (which is 100% accuracy). The comparison showed that the participants were significantly worse at detecting the valence of blurred words than unblurred words. There was no significant statistical difference between people’s ability to detect the valence of blurry neutral words compared to the valence of blurry nonsensical words. Participants were equally accurate at both of these word-types. Participant responses also showed that they were statistically better at detecting the valence of negative blurry words than positive blurry words. So they were better at detecting negative valence than those of other valences.
- Date Created:
- 2015-01-06
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- Resource Type:
- Report
- Creator:
- Humeny, Courtney
- Abstract:
- 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.
- Date Created:
- 2016-02-02
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- Resource Type:
- Report
- Creator:
- Humeny, Courtney
- Abstract:
- 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.
- Date Created:
- 2016-01-05
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- Resource Type:
- Report
- Creator:
- Kolbah, Bojana and Labiche, Yvan
- Abstract:
- This paper discusses reverse engineering source code to produce UML sequence diagrams, with the aim to aid program comprehension and other software life cycle activities (e.g., verification). As a first step we produce scenario diagrams using the UML sequence diagram notation. We build on previous work, now combining static and dynamic analyses of a Java software, our objective being to obtain a lightweight instrumentation and therefore disturb the software behaviour as little as possible. We extract the control flow graph from the software source code and obtain an execution trace by instrumenting and running the software. Control flow and trace information is represented as models and UML scenario diagram generation becomes a model transformation problem. Our validation shows that we indeed reduce the execution overhead inherent to dynamic analysis, without losing in terms of the quality of the reverse-engineered information, and therefore in terms of the usefulness of the approach (e.g., for program comprehension).
- Date Created:
- 2011-09-01
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- Resource Type:
- Report
- Creator:
- Araujo, Wladimir, Briand, Lionel Claude, and Labiche, Yvan
- Abstract:
- Design by Contract (DbC) is a software development methodology that focuses on clearly defining the interfaces between components to produce better quality object-oriented software. The idea behind DbC is that a method defines a contract stating the requirements a client needs to fulfill to use it, the precondition, and the properties it ensures after its execution, the postcondition. Though there exists ample support for DbC for sequential programs, applying DbC to concurrent programs presents several challenges. Using Java as the target programming language, this paper tackles such challenges by augmenting the Java Modelling Language (JML) and modifying the JML compiler to generate Runtime Assertion Checking (RAC) code to support DbC in concurrent programs. We applied our solution in a carefully designed case study on a highly concurrent industrial software system from the telecommunications domain to assess the effectiveness of contracts as test oracles in detecting and diagnosing functional faults in concurrent software. Based on these results, clear and objective requirements are defined for contracts to be effective test oracles for concurrent programs whilst balancing the effort to design them. Main results include that contracts of a realistic level of completeness and complexity can detect around 76% of faults and reduce the diagnosis effort for such faults by at least ten times. We, therefore, show that DbC can not only be applied to concurrent software but can also be a valuable tool to improve the economics of software engineering.
- Date Created:
- 2013-09-01
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- Resource Type:
- Report
- Creator:
- Labiche, Yvan and Asoudeh, Nesa
- Abstract:
- In this paper we propose a method and a tool to generate test suites from extended finite state machines, accounting for multiple (potentially conflicting) objectives. We aim at maximizing coverage and feasibility of a test suite while minimizing similarity between its test cases and minimizing overall cost. Therefore, we define a multi-objective genetic algorithm that searches for optimal test suites based on four objective functions. In doing so, we create an entire test suite at once as opposed to test cases one at a time. Our approach is evaluated on two different case studies, showing interesting initial results.
- Date Created:
- 2013-10-01