Body dissatisfaction is a growing problem in the gay male population, with serious implications for psychological and social well-being. Gay men tend to be at higher risk of body dissatisfaction than their heterosexual counterparts. They report lower levels of body satisfaction and have higher rates of risky behaviors such as anabolic steroid use, eating disorders, and over-exercising (Gil, 2007; Willoughby et al., 2008; Kaminski et al., 2004). It is difficult to determine the cause of this issue in the gay community; however, two theories have been proposed to help explain this phenomenon. Minority stress theory posits that it relates to added stress involved with being part of a minority group. Gender role strain theory identifies these concerns with the strain to conform to masculine gender roles. A common link to bridge the two theories together may be visibility management, which is the way gay men carefully disclose behaviors that would identify their sexual orientation (Lasser & Tharinger, 2003). The proposed method will include participants that will be approximately 130 gay men 18-23 years of age. Participants will be sought through online collection from universities in the United States. Participants will respond to empirically validated measures in regards to Minority Stress, Gender Role Strain, Visibility Management, and Body Dissatisfaction to help determine if what links there are between these variables. / text

The aim of this essay is to discuss some of the shared legacies of oppression between queerness, femininity, and fatness in order to theorize a form of activism that can do justice to these intersecting identities. A key component of this is to discuss the complexities of negotiating the shame and pride that go hand in hand with stigmatized identities, a project recently taken up by queer theorists that has yet to be well represented in fat studies or activist circles. This essay will engage with conversations happening in queer theory and fat studies about shame as it relates to the politics of attachment. I hope to begin a conversation about how to organize effective activist circles that can do justice to queer fat femmes' complex relationships with visibility, embodiment and community building. / text

Innovation is widely recognized as a key to economic growth. Most research on the innovation process has focused on the results of R&D projects. The positive relation between R&D intensity as an input and innovative performance as an output has become the canonical image for research on innovation. While R&D is an important input to innovation, there is growing evidence that a significant share of innovation is not born from R&D. Much of this non-R&D innovation consists of incremental improvements to existing products, or process innovations, although non-R&D innovation is not limited to these kinds of improvements. Non-R&D innovations can also come from problem solving activities or pursuit of new product ideas outside of a formal R&D project. Such activities would be missed in innovation accounts based on regular, formal R&D. Given the importance of innovation for the sociology and economics of science, and the central role of innovation in policy debates, this study expands the study of innovation to include non-R&D innovations and analyzes the drivers and outcomes of non-R&D compared to R&D-based innovations, with the goal of improving science and innovation policy by: examining the concept of innovation from different theoretical perspectives (Chapter 2), creating new measures and improving understanding of existing measures (Chapter 3), developing new models of the innovation process based on knowledge and learning that expand beyond the existing emphasis on R&D inputs (Chapter 4), and different participation of R&D and non-R&D innovations in markets for technology (Chapter 5). The main results show that the relative effectiveness of learning by R&D and non-R&D for innovation is contingent on nature of knowledge, characterized by generality (i.e., high mobility/transferability) and visibility (i.e., tighter links between actions and outcomes), and that non-R&D inventions are less likely to engage in the licensing market, but are more likely to have exclusivity clauses than R&D inventions. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for management of innovation and innovation policy.

The visibility-aware path planner addresses the problem of path planning for target visibility. It computes sequences of motions that afford a line of sight to a stationary visual target for sensors on a robotic platform. The visibility-aware planner uses a model of the visible region, namely, the region of the task space in which a line of sight exists to the target. The planner also takes the orientation of the sensor into account, utilizing a model of the field of view frustum. The planner applies a penalty to paths that cause the sensor to lose target visibility by exiting the visible region or rotating so the target is not in the field of view. The planner applies these penalties to the edges in a probabilistic roadmap, providing weights in the roadmap graph for graph-search based planning algorithms. This thesis presents two variants on the planner. The static multi-query planner precomputes penalties for all roadmap edges and performs a best-path search using Dijkstra's algorithm. The dynamic single-query planner uses an iterative test-and-reject search to find paths of acceptable penalty without the benefit of precomputation. Four experiments are presented which validate the planners and present examples of the path planning for visibility on 6-DOF robot manipulators. The algorithms are statistically tested with multiple queries. Results show that the planner finds paths with significantly lower losses of target visibility than existing shortest-path planners.

Abstract This research employs a mixed-methods design combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches in order to carry out a thorough investigation into the relationship between the translator’s visibility and their job-related happiness. In the quantitative phase, analysis is based on 193 Chinese translators in the greater China region, which comprises Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Macao. This study has found that, in our sample, visibility is rewarding in terms of social exchanges and learning experience, but not in terms of pay and prestige. Further, we have confirmed that the more visible translators are happier. In the qualitative phase, three case studies explore the relationship between the translator’s visibility and their job-related happiness. We have found that visibility not only nurtures the translator but also benefits the client, since translators feel that they can better receive their clients’ feedback and that the translators are working in a way that their clients appreciate.

Working with international suppliers in global supply chains, manufacturing firms now are faced with substantial supplier risks which could be triggered by disruptions in either their suppliers or the supplier’s market. Reactive actions to the risks, however, have usually been shown to be inefficient and sometimes ineffective. In this dissertation, therefore, I develop a theoretical framework linking some key relationship-specific capabilities to supplier risk. My contention is that the capabilities, when developed, can help proactively mitigate the risk. Thus, the model in this study is grounded in the resource-based and the relational views. In this study, the survey method has been employed to collect data from 66 manufacturing firms in the United State who are sourcing from international suppliers. Procedural and statistical methods have been employed to guard against typical empirical issues including non-response bias, common method bias, and problems in validity and reliability of measurement instruments. Structural equation modeling with partial least squares was employed to test the model with bootstrapping to estimate t-values for the paths. The analysis results showed support for the model. A conclusion from the study is that visibility is the critical relationship-specific capability that needs to develop for buying firms to mitigate supplier risk proactively. This is because it may not be substitutable by other mechanisms like goodwill trust, and other capabilities, including absorptive capacity and IT integration, will only operate via visibility to influence risk performance. Moreover, visibility is a significant capability that helps mitigate risk regardless of the relationship duration between the buyer and the supplier and of the market conditions under which the supplier is working. This study thus adds to the risk literature with discussions of supplier risks. Nuances have also been added to the resource-based and relational views by developing the theoretical relationships among the identified capabilities and by examining the contextual conditions under which the relationships are working to mitigate supplier risk. Managers from both sides of a dyadic relationship may benefit from the study by utilizing the tools and the study results to monitor and mitigate supplier risk.

In current online games, player positions are synchronized by means of continual broadcasts through the server. This solution is expensive, forcing any server to limit its number of clients. With a hybrid networking architecture, player synchronization can be distributed to the clients, bypassing the server bottleneck and decreasing latency as a result. Synchronization in a decentralized fashion is difficult as each player must communicate with every other player. The communication requirements can be reduced by computing and exploiting frontier sets: For a pair of players in an online game, a player's frontier is the region of the game space where the player may move without seeing (and without communicating to) the other player. A pair of frontiers is called a frontier set. This thesis describes the first fast and space-efficient method of computing frontier sets in large terrains. Frontier sets are computed by growing regions in a connected set of quads in a hierarchical decomposition of the terrain. The solution involves the precomputation of a potentially visible set (PVS) for each quad in the decomposition, which stores all the quads potentially visible from any point within the current quad. Since the memory needed to store the PVSs for all the quads is quite large, a compression technique is introduced which controls the size of each PVS. A PVS merging algorithm, with both lossless and lossy variations, is also described which permits adding the PVS of a point or quad to the PVS of a growing region. The new algorithm is compared to a simple region growing approach where frontiers are grown along the individual terrain points. Using similar merging techniques, the new algorithm performs better, producing larger frontier sets with faster execution times. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2010-05-25 14:53:24.375

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Shadows provide an important cue in computer graphics. In this thesis we focus on real-time soft shadow algorithms. Two new techniques are presented, both run entirely on modern graphics hardware. "Soft Shadows Using Precomputed Visibility Distance Functions" renders fake soft shadows in static scenes using precomputed visibility information. The technique handles dynamic local light sources and contains special computation steps to generate smooth shadows from hard visibility functions. The resulting images are not physically accurate, nevertheless the method renders plausible images that imitate global illumination. "Soft Projected Shadows" is a simple method for simulating natural shadow penumbra for projected grayscale shadow textures. Shadow blurring is performed entirely in image space and needs only a couple of special blurring passes on pixel shader 2.0 hardware. The technique treats shadow receivers as nearly planar surfaces and doesn’t handle self shadowing, but executes very fast and renders plausible soft shadows. Multiple overlapping shadow casters in a single shadow map are natively supported without any performance overhead.

Natural environments, namely green and blue spaces, have been found to have positive influences on mental health outcomes globally. As the contribution of poor mental health to the disease burden increases, the mechanisms through which natural environments may improve health are of growing importance. This study creates a novel visibility index methodology and investigates whether i) views of natural environments and ii) access to natural environments, are associated with psychological stress and physical activity in Wellington, New Zealand. It also builds upon the work conducted in New Zealand as the first study to investigate links between blue space and mental health and provides an insight into the mechanisms through which increased natural environments may improve health. Individual level data for 442 individuals from the New Zealand Health Survey was obtained and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) were used to investigate whether area-level exposure to natural environments influenced their psychological stress and levels of physical activity. Results from regression analysis indicate that increased distant visible green space (beyond 3km), visible blue space, and a combination of green and blue spaces from neighbourhood centroids reduce psychological stress. Some access measures to natural environments were found to have positive associations with psychological stress, however increased proximal access to green space was associated with decreased physical activity. The findings conclude that the visibility of natural environments appears to have stronger associations with stress reduction than access to them. The findings of this paper should influence urban development and inform decision and policy making, particularly the development and/or relocation of health related facilities.