A New Community Park for Wellness presents a new vision for parks. It proposes a new era of park programming, the ‘Community Wellness and Holistic Health Era’ in order to improve our communities with design that highlights natural phenomena. Today, health is no longer about disease or death; it’s about maintenance - getting outside, having access to fresh food and living a balanced lifestyle. Drawing on historical and contemporary wellness precedents, this practicum aims to create a community destination that promotes health and prevents disease in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It documents investigations into park programming and design, current trends in health and wellness, potential roles of light and water in landscape architecture, and light in modern and post-modern Scandinavian architecture. The final design emphasizes natural phenomena and processes related to light, water and energy in order to promote health and reconnect urban residents with time, place and the changing seasons.

This qualitative exploratory research study examined the experiences of older women (over age 55) whose husbands had been admitted to a personal care home (PCH) in Winnipeg, Manitoba within the previous twelve (12) months. In-depth, semi-structured, one-on-one interviews were conducted with six (6) women. Socialist feminist and feminist caregiving theoretical frameworks along with narrative analysis were used gain insight into the participants’ needs surrounding their experiences of the admission. Findings include the fact that changes in women’s formal and informal supports began occurring years before their husbands’ admissions. The all-encompassing role as caregiver for their families continued to be central in their lives even after the admission. While women met their material and emotional needs through a range of formal and informal services, the participants were more likely to see needs met through informal means. Themes emerging from the research included those of guilt, entitlement, obligation, and reciprocity.

This thesis compares Chaucer’s production of the image of himself as author in The House of Fame to his production of characters in Troilus and Criseyde. In doing so, this thesis brings to the forefront an image of Chaucer as an author concerned with both the manner in which his work would be received in posterity as well as the manner in which he would be received through his work. It is my contention that Chaucer goes to great efforts to embed a complex and defined model of textual authority that is able both to resist and withstand orthodox cultural authority as a guarantor of meaning in his time and times to come. This model, which Chaucer terms his “matere,” is upheld, supported, and based in the figures in and of the texts, characters and author.

This thesis explores tree symbolism as interpreted from a selection of Old Norse poetic and prose mythological sources. The primary poetic sources include the Eddic poems Vǫluspá, Hávamál, Grímnismál, Vafþrúðnismál, Lokasenna and Baldrs draumur. Selected fragments from these poems are arranged and analyzed with particular attention to the symbol of the tree. Fragments are also selected from Gylfaginning of Snorri’s Edda, and are explored alongside the poetic sources. The focus topics progress from a description of the tree at the beginning of time, as the spatial structure of the mythic cosmos, the object of sacrifice, weapon of death, material of mortal creation, instrument of fate and, finally, source of rebirth after the cosmic destruction. The aim is to observe the transformation of the symbol of the tree both spatially, within the Eddic cycle, and temporally, as the prose accounts drawn from Gylfaginning are believed to be younger than the mythological poems. The abstract concept of the book is developed in relation to the symbol of the tree, and as the thesis progresses the relationship between tree, book and human is developed that ultimately seeks to mobilize the dynamism of such associations. The hopeful outcome undertakes to provide some insight into the human condition. This thesis is also theoretical and two important sources are applied to the poetic subject: the socio-philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, along with the psychoanalytic interpretations of Carl Gustav Jung. Both of these voices address the symbol of the tree and its significance for the human condition, which, when considered alongside the close analyses of the textual fragments approach what is common to the tree, the book and the human, but also discerns where the three points diverge.

A widely used instructional method for teaching children with autism is Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), and a main component of ABA programming is discrete-trials teaching (DTT). DTT is made up of a series of brief teaching trials, with each trial including an antecedent (e.g., an instruction from the teacher), a response from the child, and an immediate consequence (e.g., a reinforcer provided for a correct response). Using a modified multiple-baseline design across participants, Experiment 1 assessed the effectiveness of a DTT self-instructional package (Fazzio & Martin, 2007) for teaching 4 pairs of newly-hired ABA tutors how to apply 21 components of DTT to teach 3 tasks to a confederate role-playing a child with autism. In Experiment 2, a group of 8 additional tutors were each independently presented with the same procedure. In both experiments, in Phase 1(baseline), tutors attempted to teach the 3 tasks to the confederate. In Phase 2 (manual), tutors mastered a 37-page self-instructional manual and once again attempted to teach the same 3 tasks to the confederate. Phase 3 was a within-subject AB design component. That is, if tutors did not meet a DTT mastery criterion of 80% after studying the manual in Phase 2, then they watched a brief video demonstration of a DTT expert teaching a task to a child role-playing a child with autism (Fazzio, 2007), and then once again attempted to teach the 3 tasks to the confederate. Across both experiments: a) The 16 tutors averaged 4.6 hours to master the self-instructional manual, and showed an average improvement in DTT accuracy of 32.2% from baseline; b) For the 13 tutors who did not meet the mastery criterion after reading the manual, their average DTT performance improved an additional 12% after watching the video; c) 13 of the 16 participants met mastery (3 after the manual and 10 after the manual plus video), and the other 3 tutors were very close to mastery. The results suggest that the training package is a practical, economical and efficient method of instructing newly-hired tutors in ABA programs for children with autism.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between wealth, wealth inequality and health. The study has a cross-national focus and employs a political economy perspective, which addresses the macro-political determinants of health. The dissertation is comprised of two sets of analyses. In Part 1, logistic regression analyses confirm that wealth, whether measured as home ownership, the value of the home, or net worth, is a significant predictor of self-rated health in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany. The relationship between wealth and self-rated health is weakest in Germany. Case studies of the three countries indicate that this weaker relationship may be linked to more generous welfare state provisions in Germany. In Part 2, bivariate analyses reveal that wealth inequality, whether measured as the Gini coefficient or the share of wealth held by the richest 10% of the population, is related to poorer population health outcomes in developed countries. Both unweighted and weighted correlations are strong and significant, even after controlling for a variety of potential macro-level confounders. The results are strongest for female life expectancy and infant mortality. In-depth analysis of the countries with the most equitable distribution of wealth and the best health outcomes reveals several themes: high rates of home ownership, relatively generous pensions, stronger regulatory frameworks, taxation of wealth, increased social expenditures in recent years, and social cohesion. The results of this dissertation suggest that wealth is an axis of inequality that deserves far more attention from sociologists, particularly in relation to population health. Relying on income alone to describe inequality and form public policy is inadequate for understanding and addressing the economic and health circumstances of individuals and families. The inclusion of wealth in sociological studies of health disparities will result in a more accurate picture of social stratification, and will result in better informed social policy. Finally, the use of a political economy framework allows us to better understand, and potentially change, the political and economic processes through which the distribution of both wealth and health occurs.

For much of the history of saga scholarship, questions of origins, the role of feud, kinship, and the structure of the society, and its institutions, have been fertile grounds for research. As such, the female characters – who were certainly less overtly prominent in the settlement of the country as outlined in the texts, as well as in the public and institutional structures – have often been overlooked as subjects of in depth scholarly enquiry. Turning a sharp gaze upon three particular characters, from three different sagas: Auðr from Gísla saga, Guðrún from Laxdæla saga, and Hallgerður from Njáls saga, and entering upon a comparative analysis of the introductions, marriages, and divorces – if applicable – of the characters, this study refutes the archetypical models under which these characters are sometimes studied, and examines the idea of marriage, contrary to its commonly perceived function, as largely a destabilizing force.

The purposes of this study were to: 1) determine absolute intrarater reliability of using the cervical range of motion device (CROM) for measuring cervical movements in older adults, and 2) determine the intrarater reliability and concurrent validity of the Candrive protocol, which uses a universal goniometer to measure rotation. Forty older adults (75.7 + 4.7 years of age) were tested in two sessions, one week apart, by two raters. Intrarater reliability scores were good for the CROM protocol (coefficient of variation (CV) values were 5.5% and 6.2 % for cervical rotation). The Candrive protocol values were higher (CV = 7.9 and 9.4%). Concordance analyses suggested that the Candrive protocol was less than good in terms of its validity, particularly when order effects were taken into consideration. In conclusion, the CROM protocol demonstrated good reliability for either group or individual analyses, whereas the Candrive protocol was less reliable and its validity marginal.

HIV/AIDS, discovered in the early 1980s, has now become a world-wide epidemic. The most affected area is Africa, in particular sub-Saharan Africa. This exploratory research project examined the challenges facing grandmothers and focused on Zambia because with 1,291,079 orphans, Zambia has the highest proportions of orphans in the world. Evidence demonstrates that grandmothers care for approximately 43% of the 845,546 AIDS orphans. Young men and women aged between 15 and 49, despite good health and higher education, have continued to die from AIDS, leaving behind children who are cared for by their grandparents and in particular their grandmothers. The experiences of these grandmothers are not known due to a paucity of studies on the subject. This study is a scoping review of literature on HIV/AIDS in Zambia and its impact on the family. A number of journals, books, and reports were investigated. The major themes arising from the literature were identified and discussed; they include HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and HIV/AIDS in Zambia, impact of HIV/AIDS on households and Zambia’s response to the epidemic. This research uses three perspectives: conflict theory, social capital and role conflict to guide the exploration of the social impact of HIV/AIDS on families and society. The study provided an opportunity to identify and examine the challenges facing grandmothers who care for their AIDS orphans and consequently to offer potential solutions. It also contributed to a broader understanding of the social significance of HIV/AIDS.

Fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) is a multifunctional protein translated as CUG-initiated, high molecular weight (hi FGF2) or AUG-initiated, low molecular weight (lo FGF2) isoforms with potentially distinct functions. Previous work showed that overexpression of hi- but not lo FGF2 elicited chromatin compaction resulting in cell death, by an intracrine route. A series of studies were undertaken aimed at extending our understanding of the intracrine action of Hi FGF2. Major findings are as follows: a. Hi FGF2 overexpression induces apoptotic cell death, as indicated by increased TUNEL staining, and mitochondrial participation (cytochrome c release to cytosol, rescue of the hi FGF2 phenotype by the anti-apoptotic protein Bcl-2. b. Increased expression of pro-survival signals/proteins that are known to upregulate Bcl-2, such as nuclear Akt; the PIM-1 kinase; and the heat shock protein hsp70, also rescued the hi FGF2-induced phenotype. c. The hi-FGF2 effect was associated with sustained, intracrine, activation of ERK, and was blocked by ERK inhibitors. d. FGF2 isoform specific affinity chromatography followed by mass spectroscopy identified several proteins as potentially interacting with hi FGF2; of these, the p68 RNA helicase and the hsp70 were further confirmed as interacting partners, by co-immunoprecipitation. e. Increased nuclear co-localization, and possibly interaction, between hi FGF2 and overexpressed hsp70 correlated with rescue from hi FGF2 induced cell death. f. Factors associated with cardiac pathology (isoproterenol, angiotensin II, endothelin I) also upregulated endogenous hi FGF2 in cardiac cells in culture. Adriamycin-induced cardiotoxicity in the rat, known to be linked to increased incidence of apoptosis, was also associated with increased endogenous hi FGF2. g. Hi FGF2 is expressed in the human heart (atria) and localizes in both cytosol and nuclei, suggesting a participation in human heart physiology and pathophysiology. Work presented here is consistent with the notion that endogenous hi FGF2 up-regulation may play a role in promoting cell death during prolonged tissue stress and dysfunction. It follows that processes related to hi FGF2 upregulation, hi FGF2-nuclear protein interactions and mechanisms of hi FGF2 induced cell death, represent potential therapeutic targets for modulating cell death.