High-technology and information technology industries represent a growing component of 'new economy' sector activities. Cities around the world often perceive these industrial and commercial activities to be high-growth in nature, bringing economic advantages and benefits to the cities where they are situated within. Concentration of hightechnology and information technology economic activity in cities has resulted in the formation of localstrategies and related policy initiatives aimed at attracting these sector industries into designated areas. Initial problems that ensued revolved around questioning the legitimacy, effectiveness and appropriateness of implementing these policy initiatives, which were characteristic of 'induced' development. Impacts on broader issues regarding the city's space-economy and structure were often not taken into account in these implemented high-technology led strategies and policies. This thesis responds to these problems by addressing the planning imperatives of initiating high-technology sector led development in urban environments. False Creek Flats was the primary case study examined in this thesis. Due to the proximity of the False Creek Flats site to Vancouver's metropolitan core, a research concentration on the inner-city is carried throughout the thesis. The research objectives and question are aimed at examining challenges posed to planning by following a particular policy and city initiated development path for high-technology sector concentration in False Creek Flats. Objectives are focused around the purpose of conducting a policy analysis on the process and initiatives for high-technology policy formation that occurred over the past decade in False Creek Flats. The research methodology consisted of gathering relevant and informing data and theories through an academic literature review. Information derived from editorial sources was also utilized to situate issues directly related to the primary case study. City of Vancouver policies, documents and sources represented a majority of the primary sources pertaining to the policy analysis of the high-technology framework for False Creek Flats. An internship conducted with the City of Vancouver Central Area Planning Division contributed to gaining access to information and planning perspective on the Flats high-technology led strategy. The stated imperatives to planning are based on False Creek Flats high-technology led strategy's classification as a primarily induced development. Imperatives exhibited in the policy framework formation and details are the importance of the proactive and assertive stance taken by the City of Vancouver and Planning Department. Flexibility, evolution and innovation to formulate new planning responses to deal with the problems and opportunities of implementing high-technology initiatives in the Flats were found to be essential. Planning implications for this case study include the ability to examine the issues from a broader perspective to take into account ramifications on existing city policy, structure and function. These planning elements are going to be critical in maintaining the original guiding principles, vision and goals for high-technology sector concentration in False Creek Flats. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

This project posits the need for a design approach to the use of urban sub-infrastructural spaces as public space. The potential held within these neglected parts of the city presents opportunities for the integration of architecture and landscape. The site beneath the infrastructure of the downtown Granville Bridge is one of the last remaining undeveloped parts of downtown False Creek. Surrounded by extreme residential density, the site is formed by the infrastructure creating a unique space unlike any other in the city. Artists involved in small scale industrial production such as textile, fashion, film, and furniture, rely on the city for survival. The design, prototype, production, display, consumption, and involvement of these activities within the public realm are important components to the identity and vigor of any metropolitan city. This project will explore, capture, and capitalize on the unique landscape qualities of partial enclosure provided by the bridge structure. This existing condition provides a spatial quality that is suggestive of opportunities for the integration of interior and exterior functions. With appropriate design intervention this place can become a unique public space while fulfilling the need for a production and entertainment space in downtown Vancouver / Applied Science, Faculty of / Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of / Graduate

Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007) have focused on the evolutionary aspect of memory by showing that when participants rate words relative to their relationship to survival, their subsequent retention of those words is superior to other well-known encoding techniques. Survival processing was induced using a written scenario of being stranded in grasslands that participants read. Several other experiments have replicated their findings, and some incorporated the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm with survival-processing (Roediger, & McDermott, 1995). The use of DRM word lists has been shown to increase rates of false memories, and the same pattern held true with the original grassland scenario. The current experiment was designed to illustrate the adaptive memory effect in situations that humans presently experience on a common basis. The grasslands scenario was compared with two other modern scenarios. Furthermore, effect of survival processing on false memory was assessed using both DRM narratives and word lists. Most results support previous findings of the processing advantage elicited by the grassland scenario. However, words rated for relevancy to the non-survival related modern scenario were recalled more often than words from the other two scenarios. As expected, participants’ false and veridical memory was greater in the narrative condition compared with the word list condition. The survival-processing advantage does extend beyond word lists to the narrative format, supporting the evolutionary account that humans have selectively tuned cognitive processing. Keywords: memory, adaptive memory, evolution, survival processing, DRM, narrative, false memory, word list

Epigenetic changes (specifically DNA methylation) have been associated with adverse health outcomes; however, unlike genetic markers that are fixed over the lifetime of an individual, methylation can change. Given that there are a large number of methylation sites, measuring them repeatedly introduces multiple testing problems beyond those that exist in a static genetic context. Using simulations of epigenetic data, we considered different methods of controlling the false discovery rate. We considered several underlying associations between an exposure and methylation over time. We found that testing each site with a linear mixed effects model and then controlling the false discovery rate (FDR) had the highest positive predictive value (PPV), a low number of false positives, and was able to differentiate between differential methylation that was present at only one time point vs. a persistent relationship. In contrast, methods that controlled FDR at a single time point and ad hoc methods tended to have lower PPV, more false positives, and/or were unable to differentiate these conditions. Validation in data obtained from Project Viva found a difference between fitting longitudinal models only to sites significant at one time point and fitting all sites longitudinally.

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Previous studies of saw marks have primarily focused on morphological characteristics and their utility in identifying saws suspected to have been utilized in cases of criminal dismemberment. The present study examined the extent to which metric analysis may be used to correlate saw blades measurements of kerf width. A sample of 56 partially defleshed white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) limbs were utilized as a proxy for human remains. The partial limbs were cut using a variety of commercially available saws, including 11 manual-powered saws and 5 mechanical-powered saws. A total of 500 false start kerfs (FSKs) were measured using digital calipers. Two experiments were performed, with the first test examining the kerf widths of false starts produced on specimens that were restrained using clamps, while the second test analyzed the kerf widths of false starts produced on minimally restrained specimens. Statistical analysis using Hierarchical Linear Modeling indicated a positive relationship between saw blade width (mm) and minimum kerf width (MKW), with the model estimating that MKWs would increase by 1.61 mm for every millimeter increase in blade width. Results from the models indicated that blade width (p<0.001) and the difference between mechanical- and manual-powered saws (p=0.029) were considered statistically significant. A comparison of MKWs produced using manual-powered saws on unrestrained and restrained bones suggests that restraint condition (p=0.009) is statistically significant. In comparisons of MKWs to blade widths, the average ratio for used saws was 2.7% greater than the average ratio for new saws. The mode of the ratios was approximately 1.4, supporting the general rule that MKW does not exceed 1.5 times saw blade width.

Today’s intensive care units monitor patients through the use of various medical devices, which generate a high ratio of false positive alarms due to a low alarm specificity. The false alarms have resulted in a stressful working environment for healthcare professionals that are getting more desensitized to triggered alarms and causing alarm fatigue. The patient safety is also compromised by having high noise levels in the patient room, which disturbs their sleep. This thesis has developed an intelligent alarm system with an improved alarm management and the use of 23 intelligent algorithms to minimize the number of false positive alarms. The suggested system is capable of improving the alarm situation and increasing the patient safety in critical care. The algorithms were modeled with fuzzy logics consisting of delays and multi parameter validation. The results were iteratively developed by having focus groups with various experts.

The web has granted everyone the opportunity to freely share large amounts of data. Individuals, corporations, and communities have made the web an important tool in their arsenal. These entities are spreading information online, but not all of it is constructive. Some spread misinformation to protect themselves or to attack other entities or ideas on the web. Checking the integrity of all the information online is a complex problem and an ethical solution would be equally complex. Multiple latent factors decide how a topic spreads and finding these factors is non-trivial. In this thesis, the patterns of different topics are compared with each other and the generalized patterns of fake, true, and mixed news, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic models. We look at how the dissemination of topics can be compared through different metrics, and how these can be calculated through networks related to the data.  The analyzed data was collected using the Twitter API and news article scrapers. From this data, custom corpora were made through lemmatization and filtering unnecessary words and characters. The LDA models were made using these corpora, making it possible to extract the latent topics of the articles. By plotting the articles according to their most dominant topic, graphs for the popularity, size, and other distribution statistics could easily be drawn. From these graphs, the topics could be compared to each other and be categorized as fake, true, or mixed news by looking at their patterns and novelty. However, this brought up the question if it would be ethical to generalize topics in this way. Suppressing or censuring an article because it contains a lot of novel information might hide constructive novelties and violate freedom of speech. Finally, this thesis presents the means for further work in the future, which could involve collecting one large, continuous dataset for a fair and accurate comparison between topics.

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Context. A large portion of all the transportation in the world consists of voyages over the sea. Systems such as Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) have been developed to aid in the surveillance of the maritime traffic, in order to help keeping the amount accidents and illegal activities down. In recent years a lot of time and effort has gone into automated surveillance of maritime traffic, with the purpose of finding and reporting behaviour deviating from what is considered normal. An issue with many of the present approaches is inaccuracy and the amount of false positives that follow from it. Objectives. This study continues the work presented by Woxberg and Grahn in 2015. In their work they used quadtrees to improve upon the existing tool STRAND, created by Osekowska et al. STRAND utilizes potential fields to build a model of normal behaviour from received AIS data, which can then be used to detect anomalies in the traffic. The goal of this study is to further improve the system by adding statistical analysis to reduce the number of false positives detected by Grahn and Woxberg's implementation. Method. The method for reducing false positives proposed in this thesis uses the charge in overlapping potential fields to approximate a normal distribution of the charge in the area. If a charge is too similar to that of the overlapping potential fields the detection is dismissed as a false positive. A series of experiments were ran to find out which of the methods proposed by the thesis are most suited for this application.   Results. The tested methods for estimating the normal distribution of a cell in the potential field, i.e. the unbiased formula for estimating the standard deviation and a version using Kalman filtering, both find as many of the confirmed anomalies as the base implementation, i.e. 9/12. Furthermore, both suggested methods reduce the amount of false positives by 11.5% in comparison to the base implementation, bringing the amount of false positives down to 17.7%. However, there are indications that the unbiased method has more promise. Conclusion. The two proposed methods both work as intended and both proposed methods perform equally. There are however indications that the unbiased method may be better despite the test results, but a new extended set of training data is needed to confirm or deny this. The two methods can only work if the examined overlapping potential fields are independent from each other, which means that the methods can not be applied to anomalies of the positional variety. Constructing a filter for these anomalies is left for future study.