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Stream Starting Soon: Exploring Theatrical Design Principles to Evoke Feelings of Safety for Livestreamers
(2025-01-14) Colins, Mathilda; He, Helen Ai; Viczko, April; Aycock, John Daniel; Leblanc, Jean-Rene
Toxic behaviour is prevalent in livestreaming communities, particularly for minority groups such as LGBTQ+, POC, and women. To combat this, current solutions employ automatic or human content moderation. While necessary, moderation is a content-based intervention that is largely reactive, removing harmful content after it has already been posted. Drawing inspiration from physical theatre, I explore an alternative approach that seeks to create digital safe spaces by proactively fostering positive emotions for the livestreamer so that they engage in behaviours that encourage feelings of safety for others in their community. I leverage the field of theatre and the elements and principles of design to offer a Framework of Controllable Qualities, where “Controllable Qualities” refers to customizable audiovisual sensory cues used to create a particular mood or atmosphere in a space (such as the volume of a Sound, the colour of a Light, or the texture of a Costume). I illustrate the application of my framework with four manually-created design probes (background images informed by the framework) deployed by participating livestreamers in a small, exploratory qualitative study. The design probes aimed to foster a spectrum of feelings of safety from extremely safe, to extremely unsafe. Through a qualitative study, I examine the values and practices that livestreamers and moderators held surrounding the creation of digital safe spaces, and if the presence of the design probes influenced feelings of safety for the livestreamer. Drawing on their feedback, I created a computational program built in Processing to automatically generate design probes. I make four contributions: 1) a richer understanding of how to translate physical theatrical design elements to a digital livestream context through the creation of a Framework of Controllable Qualities, 2) the application of a subset of the Framework of Controllable Qualities to inform the design of manual and automatically generated design probes to foster feelings of safety, 3) a deeper understanding of livestreamer and moderator practices to foster safety and inclusivity within a livestream community, and 4) an understanding of livestreamer and moderator experiences with the manually-created design probes and its influence (if any) on feelings of safety for the livestreamer.
Indigenous Health in Postgraduate Medical Education: Pathways for Enhancing Anti-racism Literacy and Praxis for Advanced Trainees
(2025-01-13) Ramé, Ana Karen; Henderson, Rita Isabel; Paolucci, Elizabeth Oddone; Crowshoe, Lynden John; Roach, Pamela; Altabbaa, Ghazwan
Racism is detrimental to health; it widens gaps in health inequities by marginalizing specific populations and sustaining structures that perpetuate harm. This results in social fragmentation that hampers the capacity of affected communities to achieve well-being. Racial hierarchies tend to characterize aspirations for equity as unachievable, using the complexity of the need to shift institutions, attitudes, and whole cultures to undermine expectations that equity be a core component and not simply an added benefit of a just society. This doctoral thesis aims to mitigate the impact of racism on health disparities experienced by Indigenous peoples in Canada by addressing unequal treatment in health systems through the advanced training of healthcare professionals, specifically medical residents across specialties. It is aligned with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) Call to Action #24, which emphasizes the expansion of “skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights, and anti-racism” for all health professionals in Canada. Decolonial and anti-racist education are promising pathways explored here for advancing healthcare equity, as they place historical, political, and social experiences at the centre of the learning process and objectives. These pedagogies promote the active involvement of learners, an approach that would seem to suit advanced medical trainees whose programs usually involve practice-based experiential learning mentored by established physicians. Such training also offers the possibility for adult learning approaches known to favour behaviour change, such as critical self-reflection over time. However, medical residency and fellowship training often involve limited exposure to the lived realities of Indigenous patients and, in turn, limited direct feedback or guidance from these. This complicates possibilities for integrating historical, political, and social components of Indigenous-focused anti-racism. This thesis presents a largely qualitative body of work that approaches these dilemmas in three parts. It begins by eliciting guidance from semi-structured interviews conducted in one Canadian province with Indigenous individuals who have accumulated experiences in health systems and health professional training (n=12). It then draws on a document analysis of formal Indigenous training in post-graduate medical education (PGME) across Canada. Finally, it returns to perspectives on health professional learning among advanced medical trainees through semi-structured interviews with non-Indigenous residency preceptors (n=19) and residents (n=14) across specialties. These sources offer insight into Indigenous guidance for PGME training in Indigenous health and anti-racism in Canada, current approaches across medical schools, and needs and possibilities for growing Indigenous-focused anti-racism learning from mentors and mentees within PGME programs. This work emphasizes that addressing anti-Indigenous racism in healthcare is essential for achieving Indigenous health equity. Integrating insights from 45 interviews and the scanning of 1179 curricular documents related to PGME with a close review of 46 containing any form of Indigenous content, this work offers a preliminary index of specialty-specific Indigenous health and anti-racism content as a potential starting point for more refined curricular development. An important implication of this work is greater clarity around how training may incorporate unique dilemmas faced in distinct medical fields and the cultural, social, and geopolitical diversity of Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Evaluating the Phenotypic Consequences of DNA-PKcs Deficiency
(2025-01-14) Kenny, Jacey; Lees-Miller, Susan; Billon, Pierre; Moorhead, Gregory
DNA-dependent protein kinase catalytic subunit (DNA-PKcs) is a serine/threonine protein kinase with a well-established role in the repair of DNA double strand breaks. Similarly, Ataxia-Telangiectasia Mutated (ATM) is a protein kinase that plays a central role in downstream signalling response to DNA damage. DNA-PKcs and ATM are members of the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase-like protein kinase (PIKK) family, which serve critical roles in the cellular response to DNA damage. To better understand the non-canonical roles of DNA-PKcs and ATM, our lab generated human cell lines with CRISPR/Cas9-mediated disruption of these proteins, marking the starting point of my project. My work demonstrates that loss of DNA-PKcs and/or ATM expression results in slower proliferation compared to parental cells, while inhibition of DNA-PKcs or ATM kinase activity had a comparatively minor effect on cell proliferation. My data suggests that this phenotype is not due to increased apoptosis, endogenous DNA damage or cell cycle defects. Comparison of the metabolite profiles of the matched control and CRISPR cell lines suggested enrichment of amino acids in the HeLa CRISPR DNA-PKcs cells which led me to hypothesize that the CRISPR cell lines have a reduced rate of protein translation. I present evidence that cells deficient in DNA-PKcs and ATM exhibit impaired global, new protein translation, revealing a potentially novel mechanism for the slow growth phenotype. This work adds to a growing body of evidence encouraging further exploration of DNA-PKcs and ATM as therapeutic targets in cancer and other diseases.
Correlating Obstructive Symptoms with Stricture Severity in Ileal Crohn’s Disease
(2024-11-28) Saunders, Bethany; Lu, Cathy; Bonni, Shirin; Novak, Kerri; Ma, Christopher; Ganesh, Aravind
Crohn’s Disease (CD) can manifest as inflammatory (non-stricturing), fibrostenotic (stricturing) and fistulizing or penetrating phenotypes. Stricturing CD, the main focus of this thesis, involves luminal narrowing and, which is often progressive leading to obstruction of the affected bowel segment. Obstructive symptoms (OS) in CD strictures can be assessed using the Stricture Definition and Treatment (STRIDENT) trial-used OS scoring system and CREOLE OS score. Clinically, OS are typically linked to advanced strictures, strictures can often result in dietary restrictions and surgery. No studies have been published to date, evaluating the severity of CD strictures and OS. Understanding the correlation between symptoms and strictures is crucial as regulatory bodies assess drug efficacy based on symptom response in CD trials. Intestinal ultrasound (IUS) accurately evaluates strictures morphology, with stricture severity and length, using established criteria: bowel wall thickness > 3mm, luminal narrowing (<1cm), with any pre-stenotic dilation (PSD) size (cm). The aim of this thesis based stsudy aims to determine if the OS of pain, bloating, nausea and/ or vomiting when comparing among CD phenotypes, and if specific OS correlate with any of the definitive stricture parameters.
Disease control practices used to prevent morbidity and mortality in preweaned beef calves
(2025-01-15) Sanguinetti, Virginia Margarita; Windeyer, Claire; Checkley, Sylvia; Adams, Cindy; Campbell, John; Morley, Paul; Smith, David
Calf morbidity and mortality negatively impact economic returns for cow-calf producers. Given this, preventing infectious diseases, including Neonatal Calf Diarrhea (NCD) and Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD) is essential. However, recommended practices to attain this have not been recently summarized or updated. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to study several aspects relevant to the implementation of disease control and update recommended practices. The objectives were to: i. summarize the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of practices in preventing health and mortality outcomes, ii. prioritize practices based on their usefulness in herds considering their effectiveness, ease of implementation, and economic feasibility, iii. assess the frequency of outbreaks, use of practices, the impact of practices on outbreaks across Canadian cow-calf herds, and the importance given to productivity parameters across regions, and iv. compile the evidence into a Calf Health Decision Tool to support discussions between producers and veterinarians and pilot it in Alberta, Canada. The work reported in Chapter 2 showed that the evidence of the impact of practices on mortality, regardless of the cause, was scarce. Only a few practices showed statistically significant associations. Herds that routinely intervened with colostrum or checked the fullness of the udder had a lower mortality risk than those not using these practices. Herds that calved early or during winter had a higher mortality risk than those calving later. Herds with longer calving seasons had a higher mortality risk than those with shorter seasons. Calves from herds that did not supplement with vitamin E and selenium at birth had higher odds of mortality than those from herds where this practice was used. Chapter 3 showed that most practices impacted both NCD and BRD. However, the evidence was of low and very low certainty. Chapter 4 found that veterinarians prioritized the effectiveness of a practice over its ease of implementation and economic feasibility. Vaccinating calves against clostridial disease and providing colostrum in case a calf had not nursed using an oesophageal tube or nipple bottle were practices considered always useful for all herds. Most practices were shown to have intermediate levels of usefulness in herds. Prophylactic and metaphylactic use of antibiotics were considered among the least useful. Yet, all practices that were considered at least very useful for some herds were deemed relevant enough to be included in a Calf Health Decision Tool. Chapter 5 found that over 40% of herds had at least one type of outbreak during the last three calving seasons. Also, it was demonstrated that eastern and western herds managed their cow-calf herds differently. Some frequently used practices were shown to increase the odds of having outbreaks. It was also found that western and eastern producers gave similar importance to several productivity parameters of their herds. In Chapter 5, it was revealed that the Tool was useful for facilitating discussions between producers and veterinarians regarding disease control. Responses showed that delaying the calving season for early calving herds was not feasible. Most herds could only follow only one of two recommended practices, either calving heifers before cows or calving seasons shorter than 80 days. Therefore, there might be an incompatibility between these recommendations. Most producers were willing to consider using some method to segregate calves by age. Given this, this could become a more widespread recommended practice. Only half of the herds vaccinated dams against NCD, and even one herd with a history of NCD outbreaks was not doing this. This may be because producers felt reluctant to manage pregnant dams in the chute. However, they were more willing to consider calf vaccination instead. The findings presented in this thesis reveal a general lack of consistent evidence proving the effectiveness, ease of implementation, and economic feasibility of practices. Overall, the work in this thesis showed that many commonly used practices make herds vulnerable to outbreaks, and thus, tailoring disease control practices to the operation is essential. Therefore, The Calf Health Decision Tool created may help support discussions between veterinarians and producers to implement this and prevent disease and mortality.