In this thesis Sequential Monte Carlo filters, or particle filters, applied to aircraft navigation is considered. This report consists of two parts. The first part is an illustration of the theory behind this thesis project. The second and most important part evaluates the algorithm by using real flight data. Navigation is about determining one's own position, orientation and velocity. The sensor fusion studied combines data from an inertial navigation system (INS) with measurements of the ground elevation below in order to form a terrain aided positioning system (TAP). The ground elevation measurements are compared with a height database. The height database is highly non-linear, which is why a marginalized particle filter (MPF) is used for the sensor fusion. Tests have shown that the MPF delivers a stable and good estimate of the position, as long as it receives good data. A comparison with Saab's NINS algorithm showed that the two algorithms perform quite similar, although NINS performs better when data is lacking.

The thesis examines the learning experience of Muay Thai training and competition through an interpretation of Whiteheads’ theory of learning. This examination is undertaken through a reflection on training and competing in Canada and Thailand during the 2009-2011 period. I will offer an analysis of learning Muay Thai through an interpretation of Whiteheads learning theory and educational philosophy. This thesis rejects learning as a product of hoarding information and recommends education must facilitate concrete and abstract experiences of the principles of freedom and discipline to allow for the development of wisdom and courage in learners. This paper argues that expressing oneself through Muay Thai facilitates non-violent dispositions by allowing for ‘rhythmic’ experiences which enable the growth of active wisdom and courage through periodic tests of training and competition. By providing an autoethnographic account of learning Muay Thai and a theoretical discussion on learning the author will provide a subsequent interpretation of Whiteheads’ theories applied to Muay Thai training and competition. This paper will also consider the educational merit of Muay Thai for marginalized identities as a consequence of developing active wisdom and courage.

Many Roma children from the EU coming to Canada as refugees have been denied a consistent education and many suffer gaps in their learning or have not had the opportunity to receive any education at all. These circumstances are mainly due to discriminating and oppressive behaviours that have historically prevailed and exist in contemporary society. In considering the difficulty that Roma children have with education, when they arrive as refugees into Canadian schools, it is imperative that Roma children be given an opportunity to access and complete an education in an environment that is supportive, free of discrimination and sensitive to their needs as learners. My research examines the role of visual art as part of an arts-based education program as a means through which Roma children are more likely to experience success with school by participating in an educational model that is engaging and supportive of their cultural ways of knowing. This paper is a case study, grounded in critical theory, into “best practices” in education that engage marginalized Roma children with learning. The study is framed around three research questions: What is distinctly problematic for Roma children in traditional school settings? How can the arts, and art education in particular engage marginalized Roma children with learning? How can Romani arts and culture be integrated into a curriculum that works to dispel discrimination and oppression of marginalized Roma children? The study is informed by interviews with a teacher working within a Canadian educational program for refugee children, families and board members of the Toronto Roma Community Centre, as well as my own personal observations and experiences. While I have determined that arts-based education is engaging for Roma children, the bigger question that has emerged is, “How can we use arts-based education to enhance the curricular lives and school success of the Roma, a culture of exclusion?” The answer lies in acknowledging that factors such as trust, personal connection with the teacher, parental involvement, First language acquisition, refugee status, cultural preservation, and integration, play a critical role in the educational success of Roma children. / Graduate / 0515 / 0273 / 0727 / kfhall@uvic.ca

Many Roma children from the EU coming to Canada as refugees have been denied a consistent education and many suffer gaps in their learning or have not had the opportunity to receive any education at all. These circumstances are mainly due to discriminating and oppressive behaviours that have historically prevailed and exist in contemporary society. In considering the difficulty that Roma children have with education, when they arrive as refugees into Canadian schools, it is imperative that Roma children be given an opportunity to access and complete an education in an environment that is supportive, free of discrimination and sensitive to their needs as learners. My research examines the role of visual art as part of an arts-based education program as a means through which Roma children are more likely to experience success with school by participating in an educational model that is engaging and supportive of their cultural ways of knowing. This paper is a case study, grounded in critical theory, into “best practices” in education that engage marginalized Roma children with learning. The study is framed around three research questions: What is distinctly problematic for Roma children in traditional school settings? How can the arts, and art education in particular engage marginalized Roma children with learning? How can Romani arts and culture be integrated into a curriculum that works to dispel discrimination and oppression of marginalized Roma children? The study is informed by interviews with a teacher working within a Canadian educational program for refugee children, families and board members of the Toronto Roma Community Centre, as well as my own personal observations and experiences. While I have determined that arts-based education is engaging for Roma children, the bigger question that has emerged is, “How can we use arts-based education to enhance the curricular lives and school success of the Roma, a culture of exclusion?” The answer lies in acknowledging that factors such as trust, personal connection with the teacher, parental involvement, First language acquisition, refugee status, cultural preservation, and integration, play a critical role in the educational success of Roma children. / Graduate / 0515 / 0273 / 0727 / kfhall@uvic.ca

The democratic deficit in the U.S. becomes strikingly evident as statistics show that only half of the population actually votes in elections. Seeing that many who do not participate in the electoral processes are also generally members of socially marginalized groups then this is an increasing social issue. The effects of this become deepening socio-economic inequalities, greater marginalization and a weakened democracy. This study argues that social workers can contribute to solve this democratic deficit by using social work to reach and include socially marginalized groups in the democratic process of electoral participation. Focusing specifically on San Francisco and the greater Bay Area, I have used qualitative method to interview representatives from non-profit organizations that provide different kind of social service and academic professors from the disciplines of Social Work and Political Science in order to investigate how social work can include marginalized non-voting groups in the electoral process. The result is analyzed together with a theoretical framework built from research on democracy, welfare research, empowerment theory and theories on community practice. The findings show that social work has an important role in creating belonging among these marginalized groups and to bring them into the political process by using social mobilizing and advocacy social work with an empowerment perspective.

Social factors and social contexts have long been implicated in shaping/influencing behaviours, actions, and outcomes, including social and health inequities. The social determinants of health concept has shown that health and health inequities are shaped by a variety of socio-cultural factors including education, socio-economic status, gender, ethnicity, and the social and physical environments in which people live. Critical drug scholars have specifically sought to understand how contexts and environments shape drug use and related harms. The “risk environment” framework, for example, suggests that drug use, risky drug use practices (e.g., needle sharing), and drug use-related harms are shaped by social, physical, economic and policy environments. Yet while contexts are frequently implicated in framing and shaping behaviours, the specific mechanisms at play are rarely unpacked. I address this gap by further “opening up” contexts of drug consumption and social marginalization in order to extend our knowledge of drug use among marginalized people who use drugs (PWUD) My dissertation includes 3 analyses of my data in the form of published (2) and submitted (1) manuscripts. Two-stage interviews (a short quantitative survey and longer qualitative interview) were conducted with fifty PWUD in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) neighbourhood in Vancouver, Canada. Data were analyzed with conceptual and theoretical tools borrowed from Situational Analysis, as well as actor-network and assemblage theories. In my first paper, I explore reasons for using drugs, and suggest that, despite known negative consequences of drug use, substance use among marginalized PWUD can be meaningful and beneficial. Participant narratives revealed four main themes regarding positive aspects of drugs and drug use in their lives: (1) pain relief and management; (2) alleviating mental health issues; (3) fostering social experiences; (4) pleasurable embodied experiences. These findings draw attention to the fallacies of drug prohibition and much current drug policy which has fabricated boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable, resulting in the criminalization and stigmatization of certain substances and the people that use them. In my second paper, I draw upon actor-network theory and event analysis to explore how contexts shape drug consumption practices. My findings illustrate how specific methods of drug consumption (e.g., smoking or injecting) are shaped by an assemblage of objects, actors, affects, spaces and processes. Rather than emphasising the role of broad socio-structural factors (e.g., poverty, drug policy) participant narratives reveal how a variety of actors, both human and non-human, assembled in unique ways produce drug consumption events that have the capacity to influence or transform drug consumption practices. In my third paper, I explore how spaces/places frequently used by PWUD in the DTES that are commonly associated with risk and harm (e.g., alleyways, parks) can be re-imagined and re-constructed as spaces/places of safety and wellbeing. Conceptualizing spaces/places as assemblages, I trace the associations among/between a host of seemingly disparate actants – such as material objects, actors, processes, affect, temporal elements, policies and practices – to better understand how experiences of harm, or conversely wellbeing, unfold, and shed light on how risky spaces/places can be re-constructed as places that enable safety and wellbeing. Taken together these 3 papers/analyses provide unique insight into not only drug use among marginalized PWUD, but our understanding of the ways in which contexts and environments shape behaviour and social phenomena. These findings have direct implication for harm reduction theory and drug policy. With greater insight into the contexts of drug use, drug policy and harm reduction strategies may be better tailored to prevent drug use-related harms. / Graduate / 2019-12-07

This thesis is concerned with the development of techniques for analyzing the sequences of stereotypical electrical impulses within neurons known as spikes. Sequences of spikes, also called spike trains, transmit neural information; decoding them often provides details about the physiological processes generating the neural activity. Here, the statistical theory of event arrivals, called point processes, is applied to human muscle sympathetic spike trains, a peripheral nerve signal responsible for cardiovascular regulation. A novel technique that uses observed spike trains to dynamically derive information about the physiological processes generating them is also introduced. Despite the emerging usage of individual spikes in the analysis of human muscle sympathetic nerve activity, the majority of studies in this field remain focused on bursts of activity at or below cardiac rhythm frequencies. Point process theory applied to multi-neuron spike trains captured both fast and slow spiking rhythms. First, analysis of high-frequency spiking patterns within cardiac cycles was performed and, surprisingly, revealed fibers with no cardiac rhythmicity. Modeling spikes as a function of average firing rates showed that individual nerves contribute substantially to the differences in the sympathetic stressor response across experimental conditions. Subsequent investigation of low-frequency spiking identified two physiologically relevant frequency bands, and modeling spike trains as a function of hemodynamic variables uncovered complex associations between spiking activity and biophysical covariates at these two frequencies. For example, exercise-induced neural activation enhances the relationship of spikes to respiration but does not affect the extremely precise alignment of spikes to diastolic blood pressure. Additionally, a novel method of utilizing point process observations to estimate an internal state process with partially linear dynamics was introduced. Separation of the linear components of the process model and reduction of the sampled space dimensionality improved the computational efficiency of the estimator. The method was tested on an established biophysical model by concurrently computing the dynamic electrical currents of a simulated neuron and estimating its conductance properties. Computational load reduction, improved accuracy, and applicability outside neuroscience establish the new technique as a valuable tool for decoding large dynamical systems with linear substructure and point process observations.

This thesis considers claims of discrimination and the interfaces that six platforms use as companies in the sharing economy. In 2015, Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and an Svirsky did an experiment with Airbnb to test the discrimination of names that sounded distinctly African American. Before and after their findings, there were members of the community who claimed that they had been discriminated against, some suing the company for not upholding their anti-discrimination policy. This leads to the question of how is one able to discriminate against someone whom they have never met and lives thousands of miles away? What information do they have to hold against them? As a result, this thesis provides a rhetorical analysis of the interfaces of six companies of the sharing economy.

abstract: This research examines the experiences and perceptions of immigrant and refugee women social entrepreneurs located within a context of economic instability, as well as the strategies that they develop to cope with such crises and volatility. To conduct this research I used a mixed-method, qualitative approach to data collection, including semi-structured, open-ended interviews and a focus group. I used feminist theory and a grounded theory approach to inform the design of my study; as such I acknowledge the participants as knowledge producers and allow for them to add in questions to the interviews and focus group and to comment on drafts of the written portion of the dissertation. The findings have indicated that these women are surviving the economic crisis by combining different income streams, including social entrepreneurship, traditional jobs and state and non-profit-aid. Moreover, the participants have found that besides monetary value, social entrepreneurship also provides alternative benefits such as personal sovereignty in their work environment, work-life balance and well-being. Also, personal history, and family and community embeddedness contribute to women's decisions to pursue social entrepreneurship. This research contributes to the growing body of research on gender and work and fills the gaps in literature currently existing in social entrepreneurship. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Justice Studies 2015

Women's empowerment is a current and crucial issue of our time. There is increasing recognition that the economic empowerment of women is essential both to realize women’s rights, and toachieve broader development goals such as economic growth, poverty reduction, health,education and welfare. This qualitative study explores women's empowerment through skills education and employment in Bali, Indonesia. The purpose of this study is to investigate the respondents experience of changes in their everyday life conditions, with particular focus on economic empowerment, with reference to other spheres of the women's empowerment. The aim is to provide knowledge that may be valuable for the work with vocational education and training for women's empowerment in the future. The study relied on semi structured interviews with Indonesian women exploring individual experiences in their everyday local context. Empowerment is a complex topic with an irreducible subjective element. The results showed empowerment at the individual level and as the research highlighted changes in different areas oftheir life was it proved difficult to grasp the extent of this change. In general, the participants experiences somewhat differed, depending on internal and external factors as well as context, describing varied changes in their life conditions. However, all the women explain the outcomeas more or less successful in different spheres of their lives. The study also stresses the need for further research, suggesting exploration in the field with supportive quantitative evidence and longitudinal study.