This research assesses changes in Canada’s national park system between the years 2000-2015 and places these changes within the broad social, political, and economic context in Canada, as well as within trends in international conservation policy and practice. The animating research questions include: how did Parks Canada respond in the fifteen years following the report of the 2000 Panel on Environmental Integrity? What political, economic, and cultural factors influenced Parks Canada Agency in this period? A further research question emerged from my findings: Why has it been so hard for Parks Canada to lead with ecological integrity as its first priority? Through a political ecological lens, the research utilizes a mixed methods approach. Using semi-formal interviews with retired Parks Canada managers, I was able to establish what had changed and how these changes were interpreted by these former employees. I also interviewed environmental NGOs to gather information on how those outside the Agency viewed the changes taking place within Parks Canada. I then collected and reviewed primary Parks Canada documents to establish the main changes, including of policy, as well as budgets and expenditures. My research found that in this period, despite efforts to shift the culture of the organization of Parks Canada to ecological integrity (EI) the Agency deepened its emphasis on visitor experience. The most recent "decade of change" in Canadian national parks policy and practice is thus reminiscent of the century-long struggle to determine whom or what parks are for and the role that Parks Canada plays in the production of Canadian identity. Although we are tempted to conclude that the decades repeat themselves like a pendulum swinging between “use” and “preservation,” this analysis suggests that this decade of change is distinct from the previous decades, with the institution increasingly emphasizing its role as nation-builder and tourism provider. This research purposes that a kind of Polanyian “double movement” is playing out on a new foundational terrain characterized by neoliberal solutions for conservation, a terrain influenced by a broader, global neoliberal transformation within state institutions. / Graduate / 2021-05-18

The purpose of the study was to examine parents’ perspectives and thoughts regarding posting images of their children on social media, a phenomenon known as sharenting. This phenomenon presents the growing number of technological concerns for social work practice and research. The study sought to explore ideas of children’s rights to privacy, consent, and integrity in relationship to sharenting. The study applied a qualitative method in the form of semi-structured interviews in order to gather empirical data. The data consisted of eight parents with children between the ages of 0 to 13 years who were recruited from a parenting group on Facebook and all self-reported as frequent users of social media. The results of the study showed that parents are very split in their views of sharenting; some see it as problematic while others see it as a possibility to share information to friends and family and coping with being a parent. The result also shows that parents believe that more information regarding consent for both children and parents from the society is needed. A conclusion made from the authors is that the field of social work must prepare for possible future problems as a result of sharenting.

<div>This research investigates the detection and exclusion of faulty global navigation satellite system (GNSS) measurements using a parameterized quadratic programming formulation (PQP) approach. Furthermore, the PQP approach is integrated with the integrity risk and continuity risk bounds of the Chi-squared advanced receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (ARAIM). The integration allows for performance evaluation of the PQP approach in terms of accuracy, integrity, continuity, and availability, which is necessary for the PQP approach to be applied to the vertical navigation in the performance-based navigation (PBN). In the case of detection, the PQP approach can also be integrated with the vertical protection level and the associated lower and upper bounds derived for the solution separation ARAIM. While there are other computationally efficient and less computationally efficient fault detection and</div><div>exclusion methods to detect and exclude faulty GNSS measurements, the strength of the PQP approach can summarized from two different perspectives. Firstly, the PQP</div><div>approach belongs to the group of the computationally efficient methods, which makes the PQP approach more favorable when it comes to detect and exclude multiple simultaneous faulty GNSS measurements. Secondly, because of the integration of the PQP approach with the integrity risk and continuity risk bounds of the Chi-squared</div><div>ARAIM, the PQP approach is among the first computationally efficient fault detection and exclusion methods to incorporate the concept of integrity, which lies in</div><div>the foundation of PBN. Despite the PQP approach not being a practical integrity monitoring method in its current form because of the combinatorial natural of the integrity risk bound calculation and the rather conservative integrity performance, further research can be pursued to improve the PQP approach. Any improvement on the integrity risk bound calculation for the Chi-squared ARAIM can readily be</div><div>applied to the integrity risk bound calculation for the PQP approach. Also, the connection between the PQP approach and the support vector machines, the application of the extreme value theory to obtain a conservative tail probability may shed light upon the parameter tuning of the PQP approach, which in turn will result in tight integrity risk bound.</div>

Advertisements are a common way to increase the revenue for websites. All users, however, are not interested in exposing themselves to advertisements and instead avoids it by installing an ad-blocker extension to their browser. In this thesis, a data collection followed by an analysis of the created dataset has been performed, with the purpose of identifying possible user integrity issues when using the ad-blocker extensions AdBlock and Adblock Plus. The study focuses on what kind of advertisements are displayed to a user and if it depend on the used ad-blocker extension or lack thereof, regional location, and the used browser. The data collection was carried out using a Selenium-based data collection tool, which both impersonated a real user surfing the Internet and scraped data from the visited websites along the way. The data collection was performed during a period of 21 days, using five different fictional users. A critical part of the thesis has been to find out how well user profiling, in the context of distributing targeted advertisement, works depending on if an ad-blocker extension is utilized or not. The used tool visited around 162 unique URLs per session and day, resulting in a dataset for further analysis. It was concluded that few differences in the number of targeted vs. untargeted ads a user was exposed to occurred in relation to regional location and used browser. The amount of advertisement decreased with the use of an ad-blocker, however, the data indicated that the share of targeted ads, compared to untargeted, increase with the use of an ad-blocker extension.

No description available.

Since grinding is often the last process of a manufactured part, caution has to be taken in order to ensure the integrity of the surface. The role of grinding induced residual stresses can be important in fatigue or wear resistance. In most cases we cannot evaluate accurately and easily their distribution. On this purpose, many scientists are working on the modeling of grinding and its effects on a many points. The main aim of this work is to analyse of residual stresses influenced by grinding parameters.

The aim of this thesis is to design, implement and evaluate an experiment that verifies the influence the size effect on selected parameters of the surface integrity. For the experiment were used highly productive reaming head MT3 made by HAM-FINAL. Evaluation of the surface integrity was done in terms of the characteristics of the surface roughness, geometric tolerances and changes in microstructure. Furthermore, the influence of the depth of chips evaluated for changes in the feed force, cutting torque and changes in specific cutting energy. The theoretical part deals with the description of the size effect, characteristic reaming, surface integrity, preparation of material and identification of highly productive MT3 reaming head.

The Masters thesis is focused on surface integrity at reaming with high productive reaming head MT3 made by HAM-FINAL. Theoretical part of thesis aims at analyse of the most frequently evalueted surface integrity parametrs and its possible influence on functional performance of machined components. Next theoretical parts are aimed at reaming process, reaming tools characteristics, detailed reaming head MT3 characteristics and its aplication in company Sauer Danfoss. The aim of experimetal part of thesis is surface integrity of holes reamed MT3 during its tool life evalation.

The quality of RNA is of great importance in gene expression studies. It is mostly measured using the RNA integrity number (RIN). Lately it has been shown that samples with low RIN and different fragmentation patterns could affect quality of sequencing data. For such low RIN samples a new approach has been developed by Illumina called the DV200 metric, which is the percentage of fragments &gt;200 nucleotides. For samples with low RIN, DV200 has proved to be a better method to predict if good quality data from RNA sequencing can be generated. However, neither RIN nor DV200 provide spatial infromation on the RNA integrity. Thus, tissues with areas of heterogeneous RNA integrity, where regions of good quality RNA sequencing data could be generated from are missed. We have designed a method to spatially evaluate the RNA integrity in tissue, which we named in situ RNA QC. The method uses three probes with three different fluorophores, each bound to three specific cDNA regions synthesized from the high abundant and well conserved 18S rRNA. With the help of in-house technology from the Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) group at SciLifeLab, we enable creation of heat maps over the RNA integrity to show spatial fragmentation patterns of RNA in tissue. This could reveal the regional quality of transcripts in situ, which is crucial knowledge when selecting samples for further RNA sequencing. The assay has been tried using different tissue fixation methods in order to show a proof of concept that formalin gives shorter cDNA fragments than acetone. The generated heat-map provides a visual overview of RNA integrity in situ; hence this method could be used to select samples for sequencing by evaluation the spatial quality of RNA. For instance from fresh frozen and formalin fixated paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissue (biobanks contain large number of longterm storage FFPE samples). With this assay we will be able to determine which samples are suitable for sequencing.

Book entries are vehicles used in accounting to accommodate non-cash transactions, timing differences and provisions. The use of book entries is a normal activity in accounting and may have their origin in accrual accounting. The management of a company may apply creative accounting techniques in the form of earnings management, in particular, adopting the practices of income smoothing and taking the so-called ‘big bath’. These practices may result in the financial manager or accountant misusing book entries. This could then lead to information of a different integrity to that which would have resulted had these creative accounting practices not been performed in the company. The question addressed in this dissertation and for which an answer is sought, is whether there is any notable difference in the integrity issues of information supplied through the accounting process and created by real transactions (real events) as opposed to information created by book entries (artificial events). The hypothesis underlying this dissertation is: The integrity of information created by book entries is based on subjective opinions because it is based on future events therefore it is not the same as integrity of information created by real transactions that is based on historical events. The new science is concerned with new guidelines, amongst other things, regarding reality, observation, objectivity, predictions and relationships among events. These new guidelines could be seen as explaining certain aspects which is relevant to the field of accounting. The attributes of a book entry are not based on reality, but are based on subjective predictions of future transactions etc. Another similarity is that a book entry is often not objective but is based on subjective observation. Notable differences were observed in the integrity of the information emerging from a real, historical event and a future event. These differences were established through the application of two research methods, namely, the use of a questionnaire and the analysis of the financial statements of 30 companies listed on The JSE Securities Exchange South Africa (JSE). The influence of book entries on certain ratios was considered, and the ratios influenced by two major book entries, namely, depreciation provision and deferred taxation, differ substantially in interpretation when the two book entries are reclassified. The results of the questionnaire also indicate that a large proportion of the financial managers in practice believe that book entries substantially influence the integrity of information. / Dissertation (MCom Financial Management Sciences)--University of Pretoria, 2003. / Financial Management / unrestricted