Integrated Pest Management (IPM) technologies have proven to be effective at increasing agricultural productivity and have been credited for providing economic, health, and environmental benefits in many developing countries. In South Asia, population growth and the increasing demand for nutritious foods have put pressure on farmers to produce more food with a relatively inelastic supply of land. Productivity enhancing practices, like IPM, have helped some farmers to meet this demand; however, with over 50 million farmers in Bangladesh and Nepal it is difficult to reach them with information about new agricultural technologies. This study evaluates the current IPM dissemination strategy being implemented by the Bangladesh Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) and uses a linear programming (LP) model to propose alternative strategies that may extend the total benefits from IPM technologies. Additionally, using data from a household survey, a bivariate probit model and a two-step endogenous participation model are used to identify factors that may influence both knowledge and adoption of IPM practices in three regions of Nepal. The results from the LP model suggest that more farmers could be effectively reached by reallocating funding that is currently used for interpersonal communications (i.e. extension agent visits and farmer field schools) to more widespread methods such as mass media and field days. The model also suggests that a dynamic dissemination strategy is necessary to encourage adoption of IPM technologies with differing characteristics and levels of complexity. The econometric analysis suggests that farmers with "network linkages" to agricultural information and inputs, such as membership in a farmer organization, are more likely to be aware of IPM and to adopt IPM practices. The survey data also suggest that farmers who are members of Marketing Planning Committees (MPC) may be more likely to adopt more IPM practices when compared to non-members. Overall, the study suggests that strategically disseminating IPM information is vital to promote the adoption of these technologies in South Asia. / Master of Science

A co-creation framework was developed for non-Indigenous scientists and engineers aiming to conduct research with Indigenous communities. Developed from pre-existing CBPR and co-creation theories, this guide incorporated the personal experiences of two master's students working on this project. As Indigenous communities and individuals are not monoliths, the first draft of this framework was devised to be expanded for use with various other groups allowing researchers to apply relevant concepts specific to their projects. The co-creation framework was developed and executed by conducting an initial water quality analysis of drinking water from SN. Initiated by Duignan’s 2019 SN health survey feedback, preliminary water parameters were analyzed for select households across the community. Community services and members were instrumental in co-creating this style of data collection and knowledge translation with GWF researchers. Collections methods were primarily adapted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which researchers were led initially by community liaisons and taken to households to collect drinking water samples. Instead, homeowners were supported in collecting their own drinking water samples and providing them to community educators from SNHS. Concurrently, further development and application of the framework were established through an interactive video podcast, Ohneganos Let’s Talk Water, employed to conduct, disseminate, and translate relevant community research. The community-centred methodology met the target audience where they were, on social media, rather than expecting them to decipher conventional WS science dissemination methods such as academic conferences or peer-reviewed papers. International and transdisciplinary collaboration was explored between Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth, students, experts, artists and community members. This multifaceted, award-winning show was the first to combine these various elements. A mixed methods approach via digital story was produced to illustrate the impact of LTW. While an extensive variety of guests and topics were discussed in the four seasons of the podcast, the digital story highlights those most closely aligned with the work of this thesis, decolonizing western science research and dissemination. / Thesis / Master of Environmental Studies (MES) / Guided by ten significant themes, knowledge sources including community feedback via social media, extensive literature review, conversations with elders and relevant graduate courses were applied to develop a co-creation framework to inform best practices for western scientists and engineers collaborating with Indigenous partners. Two case studies, community-led water testing “Preliminary Water Quality Assessment” and a community-led video podcast “Ohneganos – Let’s Talk Water,” were carried out to implement and supplement the iterative development of the framework to harmonize Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science.

No / There is an ongoing debate about the reasons for and factors contributing to healthcare-associated infection (HAI). Different solutions have been proposed over time to control the spread of HAI, with more focus on hand hygiene than on other aspects such as preventing the aerial dissemination of bacteria. Yet, it emerges that there is a need for a more pluralistic approach to infection control; one that reflects the complexity of the systems associated with HAI and involves multidisciplinary teams including hospital doctors, infection control nurses, microbiologists, architects, and engineers with expertise in building design and facilities management. This study reviews the knowledge base on the role that environmental contamination plays in the transmission of HAI, with the aim of raising awareness regarding infection control issues that are frequently overlooked. From the discussion presented in the study, it is clear that many unknowns persist regarding aerial dissemination of bacteria, and its control via cleaning and disinfection of the clinical environment. There is a paucity of good-quality epidemiological data, making it difficult for healthcare authorities to develop evidence-based policies. Consequently, there is a strong need for carefully designed studies to determine the impact of environmental contamination on the spread of HAI.

No / A culturally sensitive approach needs to be adopted in disseminating evidence-based preventive programs internationally, and very little is known about effective dissemination into low-resource settings such as low and middle income countries. Following guidelines on optimizing the fit of evidence-based parenting programs worldwide, a cultural relevance study was conducted in Panama, Central America. Parents (N = 120) from low-resource communities were surveyed to explore cultural relevance of material from the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program. Intention to participate and views on delivery formats and program features were also examined. Descriptive statistics and regressions were carried out to analyze the results. Parents found program materials highly relevant and reported that they would be willing to participate in a program if one was offered. A large proportion of the sample expressed a preference for self-directed formats such as books, articles and brochures (77.6 %). Regression analyses suggested that most parents considered material as relevant, interesting and useful, regardless of other factors such as socio-economic status, gender, the level of child behavioral difficulties, parental stress, parental confidence and expectations of future behavioral problems. The study provides a potential approach for dissemination of research and offers an insight into the needs and preferences of a particular segment of the world’s population—parents in low-resource settings. Strategies for meeting the needs and preferences of these parents in terms of service delivery are discussed.

No / Several international organizations have suggested the need for disseminating existing evidence-based parenting interventions into low-resource settings of the world in order to prevent societal difficulties such as violence. Before dissemination efforts take place, it is important to examine the fit of existing interventions in these contexts. In the present study, 80 practitioners from low-resource communities in Panama, Central America, were surveyed in order to explore their views on materials, principles and strategies of an evidence-based parenting program, the Triple P Positive Parenting Program. This study is part of a larger project in which cultural relevance was also explored from parents’ perspective, instruments were translated and validated, and a RCT was carried out to determine efficacy. Practitioners in the present study were psychologists, teachers, social workers and learning disability specialists based in school settings. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data and regression analyses were carried out in order to determine whether socio-demographic variables predicted acceptability scores. Scores for cultural relevance and usefulness of the program were high. A sample of material was found to be interesting, familiar, and acceptable. All practitioners (100 %) expressed a need to implement a parenting program in their community. Only being female and greater hours of consultation per week were associated with greater acceptability. These results have the potential to inform implementation efforts in Panama and the study offers a methodology which can be used to explore the relevance of other programs in other low-resource settings.

The topic of this study done in Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe was to explore the viability of designing and developing an e-agricultural information service at the Library of Chinhoyi University of Technology (CUT).The aim of the study was to determine the feasibility of designing and developing a web based information database for answering farmers’ queries. It also aimed to identify ways in which agricultural information can be transferred to farmers using ICTs available to the farming community and CUT. The findings indicated that an effective and efficient e-agriculture information service can be established at CUT using cell phones as the main communication medium. The research design was a survey and a questionnaire was used for data collection. SPSS was used for data analysis form which interpretations and recommendations were made. / Information Science / M. Information Science

Les réseaux véhiculaires constituent une catégorie de réseaux sans fil mobiles à part entière et présentent l'originalité de permettre aux véhicules de communiquer les uns avec les autres mais aussi avec l'infrastructure quand elle existe. L'apparition des réseaux véhiculaires s'est accompagnée de l'apparition d'une myriade et variété d'applications potentielles allant de la sécurité à la gestion du trafic routier en passant par les applications de divertissement et de confort des usagers de la route. Ces applications ont suscité beaucoup d'intérêt de la part des chercheurs, des constructeurs des automobiles et des opérateurs des télécommunications. Les applications d'information et de divertissement, pour lesquelles une grande quantité de contenus peut exister, exigent que les contenus engendrés soient propagés au travers des véhicules et/ou de l'infrastructure jusqu'à atteindre les utilisateurs intéressés tout en respectant les durées de vie potentiellement limitées des contenus. La dissémination de contenus pour ce type d'applications reste un défi majeur en raison de plusieurs facteurs tels que la présence de beaucoup de contenus, la connectivité très intermittente mais encore les intérêts potentiellement hétérogènes des utilisateurs. C'est à cette thématique que nous sommes intéressés dans cette thèse; Tout d'abord, nous nous proposons une nouvelle métrique qui calcule l'utilité apportée aux utilisateurs. Elle permet de mesurer leur satisfaction par rapport aux contenus reçus. Nous la jugeons nécessaire pour évaluer les performances d'une approche de dissémination pour les applications de confort par opposition à des applications de sécurité routière. Dans un deuxième temps, nous nous concentrons sur le développement d'un nouveau protocole de dissémination, appelé I-PICK, et d'une solution de sélection des nœuds relais, appelé I-SEND, pour disséminer les contenus d'information et de divertissement en tenant compte des préférences des utilisateurs par rapport aux contenus reçus. Notre proposition est fondée sur l'échange de messages périodiques permettant l'estimation des durées de contacts et la connaissance des préférences des utilisateurs. Ces informations sont ensuite utilisées, dans un premier temps, pour effectuer un ordonnancement efficace des contenus lors de la dissémination puis choisir les relais permettant de maximiser l'utilité des utilisateurs par rapport aux contenus reçus dans un environnement caractérisé par des faibles durées de communication. Au travers de simulations nous confirmons l'efficacité de notre approche. Pour conforter le fonctionnement de nos mécanismes, nous avons implanté dans un environnement réel nos propositions I-PICK et I-SEND. Au travers d'un scénario simple, nous avons mis en évidence des risques liés à l'hétérogénéité des machines ou bien encore la difficulté du paramétrage des temporisations. Ces premiers résultats positifs montrent l'intérêt de notre technique et ouvre des pistes d'amélioration. Notre dernière contribution concerne des mécanismes de réduction du trafic cellulaire à l'aide des communications opportunistes entre les véhicules. Quand un contenu est disponible auprès d'un serveur de contenus accessible par le réseau cellulaire, il est nécessaire de proposer une méthode efficace de sélection des sources initiales qui seront choisies pour télécharger puis disséminer les contenus. Nous optons pour une solution qui pourrait reposer sur technologie SDN ainsi que sur des communications opportunistes et qui permet de choisir les sources en tant que nœuds pouvant produire un maximum d'utilité en propageant les contenus. / Vehicular networks are a class of mobile wireless networks and have the originality of enabling vehicles to communicate with each other and also with the infrastructure when it exists. The advent of vehicular networks has been accompanied by the emergence of a myriad and a variety of potential applications that are not only restricted to road safety but span from traffic management to entertainment and comfort applications. These applications have received much interest from researchers, automobile manufacturers, and telecommunications operators. Information and entertainment applications, where a large amount of content can exist, require the dissemination of the generated content through vehicles and/or infrastructure until reaching interested users while respecting the potential limited lifetime of content. The content dissemination for this type of applications remains a major challenge due to several factors such as the presence of a large amount of content, an intermittent connectivity, and the heterogeneous interests of users. In this thesis we turn our attention to this topic. First, we propose a new metric that allows to measure the users satisfaction with respect to the received content. This metric is used to evaluate the performance of the dissemination schemes. Second, we focus on the development of a new dissemination protocol, named I-PICK, and a forwarder selection solution, named I-SEND, to disseminate information and entertaining content in vehicular networks while ensuring maximum satisfaction of the users preferences with respect to the received content. Our proposal is based on the exchange of periodic messages enabling the estimation of contact durations and the knowledge of user preferences. First of all, this information is used to conduct an efficient content scheduling during the dissemination, and then to select relay nodes for maximizing the utility to users. We confirm the efficiency of our approach through simulations. To strengthen the functioning of our mechanisms, we implemented our proposals I-PICK and I-SEND in a real environment. Through a simple scenario, we have highlighted the risks associated with the heterogeneity of the machines and even the difficulty of setting timers. These first positive results show the interest of our solutions and raise new questions to be addressed. Our last contribution concerns cellular traffic offloading schemes by exploiting vehicular opportunistic communications. We study the seed-vehicles selection problem as the first step toward bootstrapping cellular traffic offloading for content dissemination in vehicular networks. We propose a solution that takes advantage from the presence of the SDN technology as well as vehicular opportunistic communications to select as seeds the nodes that can produce maximum utility when propagating the content.

This study attempts to offer a reading of Msimang's poetry from the perspective of deconstruction. In this course it is necessary to introduce and elaborate on certain deconstruction strategies. This is mainly effected in the second chapter, where consideration is given to diachronic and synchronic perspectives on deconstruction. However, not all the ramifications of the various radical insights offered by deconstructive approaches into the various fields are explored, only the significant texts by mainly French theorists and their American disciples are investigated. Secondly, this study seeks to show that the Zulu poems under consideration are highly amenable to a deconstruction reading. This thesis examines the various practices to absorb, transform, and integrate deconstruction and to make the theory applicable as a critical method within the African languages critical environment. In the third chapter, I am chiefly concerned with the claim that a text never has a single meaning, but is a crossroads of multiple ambiguous meanings. Explaining the historical context, the interdisciplinary scope, and the philosophical significance of Derrida' s project are explored in the fourth chapter. Language has no determinate centre nor any retrievable origin or truth. Belief in such is no more than nostalgia, says Derrida. What actually exists is a complex network of differences between signifiers, each in some sense carrying the traces of all others. With psychoanalysis in the fourth chapter, the focus is not on the differences between the deconstructive and psychoanalytic critics, but on their shared assumption that works ofliterature are in some sense indeterminate. These properties lead to the sixth chapter, which deals with intertextuality according to Derrida, Barthes and Bloom. The seventh and last chapter is the general conclusion in which main observations are summarized and important aspects highlighted. Finally, this thesis attempts to illustrate why the deconstructive procedure of analysing texts in such a way as to explicate their partial complicity with the theory, makes this deconstructive reading of Msimang' s poetry possible. / African Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

In this thesis I probe into British Columbia’s (BC) Kindergarten to Grade 12 Social Studies curriculum to determine how adequately it adheres to Canada’s international treaty obligations. I give particular attention to the duties regarding dissemination of information about, through, and for human rights principles and norms that are contained within the United Nations (UN) 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (Convention) and the UN 2011 Declaration of Human Rights Education and Training (DHRET). To accomplish this, I first develop a compliance assessment tool that is based on international human rights legal standards. This tool is then used in a normative inquiry into BC’s current Social Studies curriculum to assess the extent to which its educational aim, and its conception of the learner, learning process, learning environment, teacher’s role, and evaluation satisfies the international human rights education law requirements that are articulated in the treaties that Canada has ratified. The knowledge that is generated from this investigation is of value to BC’s Ministry of Education and members of the public who are involved in BC’s curriculum development and revision, because it creates a benchmark from which to “take more active measures to systematically disseminate and promote” (UN, 2012, paragraph 25) knowledge about international human rights in BC’s schools. / Graduate

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