The Ottawa Hospital cancels hundreds of elective surgeries every year due to a lack of beds, and has an average weekday occupancy rate above 100%. Our approach to addressing these issues, by way of informing administrators of resource needs, was to model the flow of patients coming and going from the hospital. We used administrative data from the Ottawa Hospital to build a time-series model of emergency department admissions, and studied models that would predict next-day discharge of patients currently taking up hospital beds. In the latter, we considered population-averaged models for groups of patients based on their primary medical condition, as well as subject-specific models. We included the random effects from subject-specific variation to improve on predictive accuracy over the population- averaged approach. The result was a model that provided more realistic probabilities of discharge, and stable predictive accuracy over patient length of stay.

Canada's first Parliament Buildings, built in 1859--65 and destroyed by fire in 1916, were the nation's most prominent symbol of national identity and its most celebrated public space. Built into its fabric was an exclusively masculine definition of public persons, one which, at the end of the nineteenth century, women challenged in both subtle and overt ways. / This research examines the design of the Parliament Buildings as a multi-faceted building type, a complex mix of domestic, office and legislative design where both public and "private" spaces intersected. It overlays official documentation of the buildings with a rich variety of sources---archival photographs, newspaper articles and women's columns, letters, journals---to show how women transgressed the architectural prescription which placed them on the political periphery in the Ladies' Gallery, as observers and objects of observation. These sources show that, in fact, women altered and created spaces and initiated influential networks of their own both in and outside of the Parliament Buildings. By illuminating the primacy of the "political hostess," this research argues that women were not relegated to the sidelines, but appropriated---and practiced politics from within---the most privileged of spaces. / This methodology, by examining the interior organization and actual use of the Parliament Buildings, opens new possibilities for the study of legislative buildings and public buildings in general as dynamic systems of relationships rather than uni-dimensional building types. By showing how women challenged the spatial demarcations of gender and power and transformed the meanings associated with parliamentary and public spaces not initially intended for their use, we can draw a picture of the larger role women in Canada played as "public architects."

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This thesis paper explores barefoot and minimalist running in Ottawa, Ontario and Boulder, Colorado. The objective has been to answer the following questions: how can we understand barefoot and minimalist style running as cultures, how are barefoot and minimalist style running being done in different ways, how do the senses play out and create nuances between barefoot and minimalist style runners. I argue barefoot and minimalist running are distinct cultural forms. I applied an Ingoldian notion of culture that contends cultures are generative, relational, temporal and improvisational. I conducted a multi-site study and I interviewed participants, as well as conducted participant observation. My findings reveal that the different sensations experienced by the two styles of running make them meaningful in different ways. These different sensations and ways of meaning create nuances between barefoot and minimalist running and differentiate them and as a result, there are found to become different cultural forms.

Software development is a process in continuous evolution. This characteristic implies also continuous changes in the functionality of the system under development. Some of these changes may cause problems when they are not properly and timely propagated to the project members. The aim of our research is to obtain a good understanding of problems caused by the lack of awareness of changes to features during a distributed software development project, to identify information and artifact repositories used by contributors, and then to draw the requirements of an awareness mechanism to tackle the awareness problem. In order to accomplish our research goals. we conducted a four month long case study at IBM Ottawa Software Lab. which we observed the collaboration patterns of a multi-site development project team. Our findings helped us identify the most important communication media that support development. In particular, we observed that the 3-1% of communication was by phone and via face-to-face interactions. and email was mostly used to alert contributors about changes to features. We also found that changes were not properly and timely propagated due to different corporate cultures of the project teams. Finally, we found that a high volume of communication makes developers prone to overlook important information that can lead to the generation of errors during development., These findings led us to believe that miscommunication and non-timely communication of changes related to feature development caused the release of code that created failures in stable builds. To address this problem. we developed the concept of a relationship to link developers to features. Using this concept, we have designed a feature-based Awareness Mechanism System to collect information, create relationships and deliver awareness information to the contributors involved in the implementation of a feature.

The Ottawa Hospital cancels hundreds of elective surgeries every year due to a lack of beds, and has an average weekday occupancy rate above 100%. Our approach to addressing these issues, by way of informing administrators of resource needs, was to model the flow of patients coming and going from the hospital. We used administrative data from the Ottawa Hospital to build a time-series model of emergency department admissions, and studied models that would predict next-day discharge of patients currently taking up hospital beds. In the latter, we considered population-averaged models for groups of patients based on their primary medical condition, as well as subject-specific models. We included the random effects from subject-specific variation to improve on predictive accuracy over the population- averaged approach. The result was a model that provided more realistic probabilities of discharge, and stable predictive accuracy over patient length of stay.

Clinical decision rules improve health care fidelity, benefit patients, physicians and healthcare systems, without reducing patient safety or satisfaction, while promoting cost-effective practice standards. It is critical to appropriately and consistently apply clinical decision rules to realize these benefits. The objective of this thesis was to understand how physicians use the Ottawa Ankle Rules to guide radiography decision-making. The study employed a clinical judgment survey targeting members of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. Statistical analyses were informed by the Brunswik Lens Model and Social Judgment Analysis. Physicians’ overall agreement with the ankle rule was high, but can be improved. Physicians placed greatest value on rule-based cues, while considering non-rule-based cues as moderately important. There is room to improve physician agreement with the ankle rule and use of rule-based cues through knowledge translation interventions. Further development of this Lens Modeling technique could lend itself to a valuable cognitive behavioral intervention.

There are over one thousand closed ‘small’ landfills in Ontario, each with differing circumstances and potential problems. This project proposes a method of addressing such dormant sites in situ, based upon a case study in Hamilton. Of the four closed landfills within Hamilton city limits, three of them lie in the low lands of the Red Hill Creek Valley. Perched at the source of the Red Hill Creek, the Upper Ottawa Street Landfill introduces unspoken toxins into the ecosystem of the entire valley. As the storm water catchment for the escarpment watershed, the creek serves a critical role in the recreational green belt which divides Hamilton and Stoney Creek. The source of this creek must be celebrated, not fenced off from public access due to landfill hazards. This proposal investigates beyond material recovery, into the possibilities of resource, ecosystem, and community recovery. Landfill mining, material sorting, and power generation through incineration are employed to reduce landfill volume. As the landfill is consumed, a new landscape is constructed, providing improved flood-prevention at the creek and a sanitary lined landfill for those materials remaining on site. Creek, forest, and field habitats are restored on site without the threat of contamination from landfill contents. The public can safely view the landfill mining operations from an elevated walkway, having new experiences with every visit. As the boundaries of the closed landfill are stripped away, the source of the Red Hill Creek and the new recreational parkland are made publicly accessible. Using this design as a reference, the equipment and operations designed for this site can be developed into a province-wide proposal.

Thesis (M. App. Sc.)--Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-210). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

The Ottawa Hospital cancels hundreds of elective surgeries every year due to a lack of beds, and has an average weekday occupancy rate above 100%. Our approach to addressing these issues, by way of informing administrators of resource needs, was to model the flow of patients coming and going from the hospital. We used administrative data from the Ottawa Hospital to build a time-series model of emergency department admissions, and studied models that would predict next-day discharge of patients currently taking up hospital beds. In the latter, we considered population-averaged models for groups of patients based on their primary medical condition, as well as subject-specific models. We included the random effects from subject-specific variation to improve on predictive accuracy over the population- averaged approach. The result was a model that provided more realistic probabilities of discharge, and stable predictive accuracy over patient length of stay.