Social isolation and loneliness are problems that affect the quality of life of many older adults. As the proportion of older people increases in Canada and other nations, studying factors that could improve the quality of life of older people becomes even more crucial. Two studies were conducted drawing on longitudinal data (1996 and 2001) from the Aging in Manitoba Project (Study 1 N = 760) and the Successful Aging Study 2003 (Study 2 N = 228). The main objective of Study 1 was to identify the characteristics of older individuals who differed in their loneliness trajectories over time, allowing for a comparison of those who became lonely, overcame loneliness, were persistently lonely, and were persistently not lonely. A discriminant function analysis examined the social, demographic, physical, and psychological factors as potential discriminators of the loneliness trajectories. When compared to those who were neither lonely at time 1 or time 2, the most important discriminators of persistent loneliness were: living alone, being in poor health, and having low perceptions of control. These predictors were found to be more important than people’s friendships or social activities, highlighting the complexity of loneliness in later life. Study 2 examined the longitudinal relationships between loneliness, health, physical activity, and mortality, and tested Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build Theory that positive emotions (happiness) might serve to “undo” the detrimental effects of negative emotions like loneliness. Regression analyses showed that loneliness longitudinally predicted health, physical activity, and mortality, underscoring the importance of socioemotional variables to health. Moreover, happiness moderated the relationships between loneliness and physical activity and loneliness and mortality. Thus, in support of Fredrickson’s hypothesis, results suggested that happiness has the power to “undo” the detrimental effects of loneliness on physical activity and even on mortality. Being happy may indeed offset the negative consequences of being lonely. Based on these two studies, it was concluded that future interventions could target positive emotions, perceptions of control, and loneliness as ways of ultimately enhancing the lifespan, healthspan, and wellspan of older adults.

Exploitant le questionnaire élaboré par Boulet, Savoie-Zajc et Chevrier (1996), la présente étude tente de confirmer le potentiel de cet outil pour obtenir un profil des stratégies d’étude et d’apprentissage des étudiants et étudiantes inscrits en première année au Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface (CUSB) et pour dépister ceux qui sont à risque d’échec dans leurs études. Pour atteindre ces objectifs, le questionnaire a été administré à un échantillon de 200 sujets inscrits à un cours de français obligatoire pour la majorité des étudiants. L’analyse des résultats confirme un lien entre les réponses au questionnaire et le rendement académique des sujets dans ce cours. De plus, 21 énoncés se révèlent significatifs pour différencier l’étudiant à succès et celui qui est à risque. Les stratégies décrites dans ces énoncés concernent le travail universitaire régulier et l’utilisation de divers outils d’appui qui permettent aux étudiants et aux étudiantes de donner un sens à leur apprentissage.

Hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) fibre is a natural renewable material which has been used in important areas closely related to people’s daily life. The increasing need of hemp fibre of high quality requires better fibre processing methods, more advanced facilities with higher machine performance and efficiency. Decortication is the key procedure to extract hemp fibre, and it significantly affects the output fibre quality and purity. The machine used for this process, known as a decorticator, needs to be well designed. The energy requirement is worth being evaluated for decorticators. This study consisted of two parts. In the first part, the specific energy of using a hammer mill for decorticating hemp was examined. The experimental data (three hammer mill screen scenarios and three feeding masses) were used to fit modified size-reduction theories (Kick’s, Rittinger’s and Bond’s laws). The experimental data were also used to develop a linear regression model to predict the specific energy from the ratio of initial and final fibre lengths. Results showed that all modified laws and the linear model performed equally well for specific energy prediction, and they had better prediction accuracy at a higher feed rate. In the second part of the study, integrated with virtual reality (VR) technology, TRIZ (“Theory of Inventive Problem Solving” in Russian) method was used for designing and evaluating a new hemp scutcher prototype in virtual environments. An evaluation system was developed for making comparison of the new design and the traditional scutchers. The new design is expected to have a better performance in terms of scale, product quality and energy efficiency. The TRIZ-VR integrated design has great potential to be a fast, reliable and low-cost design trend.

This research constructs the virtual environment of a multi-floor building and provides some navigation assistance to enhance the navigation experience of users in the virtual environment. Based on the 2D architectural floor plans and photographs of Engineering and Information Technology Complex (EITC), a virtual environment of the multi-floor building is created using visualization modeling. Geometric modeling, texture mapping, and lighting procedures are employed to increase the visual effect. Two navigation assistance functions, walking through and optimal path navigation guiding tour, developed in the virtual environment helps users navigating in the virtual environment. Walking through allows users to navigate freely to obtain the spatial and geographical information of the virtual environment. Optimal path navigation guiding tour function leads users moving from a specified start position to the destination position along the optimal path. An improved shortest path algorithm is used for calculating the optimal path.

This dissertation consists of two essays, in which I examine the effects of incomplete or noisy information on expected risk premium in equity markets. In the first essay I provide empirical evidence demonstrating that an information-quality (IQ) factor, built on accrual-based information precision measure, is priced. This result still stands after controlling for factors, such as size, Book-to-Market (B/M) ratio, and liquidity. To explain this empirical observation, I derive a continuous-time model in the spirit of Merton’s (1973) Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM) to examine how systematic IQ risk affects security returns. Unique to my model, imprecise information influences the pricing of an asset through its covariance with: (i) stock return; (ii) market return; and (iii) market-wide IQ. In equilibrium, the aggregate effect of these covariance terms (proportional to IQ-related betas) represents the systematic component of IQ risk and therefore requires a risk premium to compensate for it. My empirical test confirms that the aggregate effect of systematic IQ risk is significant and robust to the inclusion of other risk sources, such as liquidity risk. In the second essay I extend a recent complete information stock valuation model with incomplete information environment. In practice, mean earnings-per-share growth rate (MEGR) is random and unobservable. Therefore, asset prices should reflect how investors learn about the unobserved state variable. In my model investors learn about MEGR in continuous time. Firm characteristics, such as stronger mean reversion and lower volatility of MEGR, make learning faster and easier. As a result, the magnitude of risk premium due to uncertainty about MEGR declines over learning horizon and converges to a long-term steady level. Due to the stochastic nature of the unobserved state variable, complete learning is impossible (except for cases with perfect correlation between earnings and MEGR). As a result, the risk premium is non-zero at all times reflecting a persistent uncertainty that investors hold in an incomplete information environment.

Recently, consumers have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of product placements that occur across all forms of media. Despite this enthusiastic use of product placements, researchers have not determined whether or not this form of advertising produces profitable outcomes for featured brands. In the framework presented here, I have sought to outline how basic cognitive processes may be used to account for some of the divergent consequences that occur for product placements. Unlike other frameworks that treat memory as a separate outcome of product placements, I conceptualize memory as nonanalytically influencing other more critical outcomes such as brand evaluation and selection. The nonanalytic influence of memory is hypothesized as occurring via an attribution that is made about the ease experienced when processing a brand that has been previously encountered. To examine whether this nonanalytic framework, or an alternative framework that rests on more deliberate, analytic processing, can be used to account for the various consequences that arise after a product placement, four studies were conducted. In each of these studies, participants were presented with a narrative containing a number of brand presentations. Later, participants completed tasks that assessed memory and brand preferences across the various studies. In the first two studies, the impact of the presentation of a brand within a narrative was examined. These studies revealed that a nonanalytic influence of memory was observed, but only when there was a match in modalities across the product placement event and the manner in which more critical outcomes are obtained. Thus, fluency-based perceptual processing was found to nonanalytically influenced participants’ brand preferences. Extending these findings, Experiments 3 and 4 examined whether this nonanalytic influence of memory would still exert its effect on brand preferences when deliberate influences, which were guided by immersion and persuasion knowledge, were manipulated. Rather than brand preferences being guided by a deliberate and analytic assessment of the brand, brand ratings were guided by nonanalytic memory influences. However, this influence only emerged when fluent processing of the brand was not attributed to the prior presentation of the brand during the narrative.

A phenomenological study was conducted to understand the lived experience of parents parenting a child with autism in a rural area. The philosophy of hermeneutic phenomenology was used to guide this inquiry. Interviews of 26 families served as primary data. Thematic statements were isolated using van Manen’s (1990) selective highlighting approach. Making the invisible, visible emerged as the essence of the parents’ experience. Parents shared that although autism is an invisible disability, they in fact made it visible in their constant battles to ensure their child received the best quality of life. Five themes represented this essence: using autism to enable, lifelong advocating, centering autism within the family, the ups and downs of living rurally, and a renewed sense of parenting. Findings from this study may be used to guide program development that is concerned with improving the quality of life families of children with autism.

The number of women in educational leadership positions has increasingly grown over the last few decades. However, there still are discrepancies between the number of women in education and the number of women represented in educational leadership, especially in the superintendency. The irony of this research is that professors in educational administration programs continually comment about a strong majority of their students being women. Furthermore, educational certification agencies report that the majority of those licensed for educational leadership positions are women. The purposes of the study was to: (a) provide opportunities for female senior administrators to offer their understanding of the barriers and challenges they have encountered during their career; (b) provide insight into the mentorship experiences and support they have received during their career; and, (c) describe their preferred/espoused leadership styles. Female superintendents identified a number of challenges over the course of their career: balancing career and home life, gender discrimination, various work conflicts and relocation. In contrast, the women in the study acknowledged the mentorship experiences and support that they received during their career from various professional colleagues or groups, educative institutions or programs, and family and friends. Their preferred leadership styles included a strong focus on relationships seconded by management and pedagogical issues. The study culminates by outlining various recommendations for practice, research and theory in chapter five.

This study examined how much literacy was depicted in six popular prime time situation comedies—Community, How I Met Your Mother, Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, The Big Bang Theory, and The Office. The first five episodes of each program’s first season were analyzed, as to the number of literacy events present and the durations of such, using a Literacy Events Checklist. Whether there were readers in evidence on the programs was examined. Whether the readers were portrayed in such a way that they, and their reading habits, might be emulated by young people was also investigated. The Literacy Events Checklists were analyzed and coded according to categories designated by the researcher. Findings indicate that literacy is depicted to a certain extent on these programs, in some programs more than in others. Readers were found in each program. A Reader Checklist was employed in order to determine common reader traits among these readers. Findings indicate that, although there are some common reader traits among the readers, they are not entirely negative. The diversity of the readers found in these programs reflects the diversity of readers in society. Recommendations for educators include sharing with students the statistics regarding the time spent reading and the time spent watching television in North America, and having students examine their own habits in this regard. This message could be brought to the community through school-wide initiatives at various levels, and the incorporation of parental involvement.

This study examines the perceptions of new teachers regarding the benefits of full-time mentorship based on one particular new teacher induction program. Six new teachers and three mentors were interviewed in this study. Data indicated that full-time mentors could effectively introduce new teachers into the teaching profession if certain conditions were present. New teachers perceived the following benefits from effective full-time mentorship: increased confidence in their abilities, opportunities for non-evaluative observation and feedback, practice teaching of lessons prior to administrative evaluations, support with resources and materials specific to their situation, and the opportunity to ask critical questions in complete confidence. However, these benefits were not perceived when an unmanageable mentor-to-teacher ratio was present. One finding not prevalent in the literature was the characteristic of disassociation whereby teachers new to the profession had difficulties disassociating their professional work lives from their personal lives. The suggestion is made that further study is warranted to determine if the characteristic of disassociation could be used as a predictor of new-teachers at risk of leaving the profession. This study concludes by making eight recommendations for improving full-time mentor support and new teacher induction.