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UNB Scholar is an institutional repository initiative of UNB Libraries intended to collect, preserve, showcase, and promote the open access scholarly output of the UNB community. Use UNB Scholar to explore specific collections, or search all content in the repository. Material submitted to the repository will also be freely discoverable online through Google and other major search engines.
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Recent Submissions
Designing breathing exercise technologies for health and wellness
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-08) Tabor, Aaron; Bateman, Scott; Scheme, Erik
This doctoral research identifies design guidelines that can improve breathing exercise technologies – guidance and feedback systems that support breathing exercises. Specifically, the research demonstrates that two commonly employed Human Computer Interaction (HCI) design approaches for increasing user engagement (i.e., serious games) and decreasing attentional demand (i.e., peripheral information systems) can be used to promote breathing exercise technologies in a way that preserves exercise integrity and benefit. This is important because breathing exercises have a wide range of health and wellness benefits, and our designs may allow these benefits to be attained more fully and by a wider audience. Further, the research also contributes novel design artifacts and insights that will support the ongoing exploration of breathing exercise technologies. The findings may generalize to other design-focused research applications such as interventions for health and wellness, serious games for rehabilitation, and peripheral and ambient information systems.
A comparison of shoulder kinematics and neuromuscular activity in eleven patient transfer techniques
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-08) Roudi, Elnaz; Albert, Wayne J.
Nurses face high rates of musculoskeletal disorders, mainly from patient handling. This study examined the biomechanical shoulder demands associated with eleven patient handing techniques from two New Brunswick programs: “Back in Form” and “All the Right Moves”. This study amid to determine if significant differences existed across techniques to inform a new patient handling program for the New Brunswick acute care system. Twenty-six nursing students were trained and performed the techniques on a patient-actor, with a second caregiver for two-person tasks. Biomechanical and neuromuscular demands were recorded using electromyography, motion capture, a dynamometer, and a Borg scale. Statistical analysis involved repeated measures ANOVA and Tukey’s post-hoc analysis for significant findings. Our study indicates that both programs have similar outcomes, with shoulder muscle activity staying below 20% MVC. Some techniques showed lower muscle activity depending on the repositioning direction. While shoulder flexion over 60° is usually a WMSD risk, neuromuscular demands were minimal.
External technology sourcing and the dark side of open innovation
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-08) Purdy, Lauren; Watson, Barry
Firms in high-technology industries face a complex set of challenges to innovate successfully and continuously, to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. At the top of this list of challenges lies the choice firms must make regarding project sourcing in their pursuit of innovation. This research makes a significant and novel contribution to this discourse and examines the sourcing decision in the context of new product development. Specifically, we apply a project-level typology along the dimensions of new R&D project source and project familiarity. Drawing from transaction cost economics and knowledge-based view theories, we empirically test our theoretically-developed hypotheses on a dataset of 2,971 biopharmaceutical R&D projects. Results from these analyses show that both R&D project source and project familiarity have significant direct effects on focal project performance outcomes. We also determine that focal project familiarity has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between project source and performance outcome.
Memory management techniques for dynamic languages
(University of New Brunswick, 2024-08) Nanjekye, Joannah; Bremner, David
Garbage collection as a field requires well-documented and reusable techniques as well as considerations for the design abstractions of programming languages. This dissertation focuses on dynamically-typed languages, whose design warrants specific studies and optimizations. The first theme of the dissertation is the use of the Eclipse OMR framework for the correct, portable, and language-independent implementation of high performing garbage collectors for the RPython Meta-tracing-JIT-based dynamic languages.
We extend the use of the framework-based garbage collectors to study the garbage collection cost for the same dynamic languages, highlighting the trade-off in performance between JIT tracing and garbage collection and thereby proposing a novel optimal JIT trace sizing solution.
We further address two problems related to the collection resizing and boxing overhead for dynamic languages. We propose a calling context aware collection presizing technique for the former and present type-based stores, a novel memory layout to optimize type polymorphism in collection data structures for the latter.
Dynamic languages often also provide foreign function interfaces; the Python language has a C API but challenges of pointer stability, lifetime complexity and memory model compatibility continue to receive little attention in the research community. We propose a garbage collection friendly Python FFI, we call CyStck, that combines a stack and light-weight handles along with migration tooling for extensions.
Saltwater Sovereigns to Land-Locked Subjects: The European and Colonial takeover of Indigenous maritime space in New England and Atlantic Canada, 1550-1755
(University of New Brunswick, 2020-01) Chaves, Kelly K.; Milner, J. Marc; Waite, Gary
Native Americans living along North America’s Atlantic coastline had always been maritime people. Before Europeans arrived on the continent, Indigenous mariners fished and whaled in their territorial waters. When European explorers appeared, Native seafarers met the newcomers not on the “in-between space” of a sand strewn beach, but as maritime equals paddling in their ocean-going canoes towards the anchored carracks in their harbours. Native Americans’ maritime capabilities astonished Europeans and challenged their long-held beliefs of oceanic superiority. As colonization progressed, English settlers, imbued with nationalistic rhetoric proclaiming themselves to be “sovereigns of the seas,” quashed southern New England’s Indigenous maritime resistance against their settlements through a series of wars and coastal land grabs that dispossessed Native peoples from their coastal lands and adjoining territorial waters. English colonizers allowed subjugated Indigenous populations to re-integrate into the maritime world in specific industries, which controlled and coerced Indigenous mariners to work for colonial merchants through debt peonage. Yet, not all Indigenous seafarers surrendered their autonomy. In the French held lands of Acadia and eastern Maine, Wabanaki mariners fought New Englanders’ attempts to empty their territorial waters of pelagic and demersal creatures and to expand colonial fishing settlements into their homelands by attacking colonial fishing vessels. An imperial geopolitical struggle between Britain and France for control of the fishery resulted in the British conquest of downeast New England and Acadia (renamed Nova Scotia) in 1713. Indigenous people, incensed by the handover of their traditional spaces from one European government to another, exerted their regional maritime power from 1715 to 1726 to counter the expanding presence of Englishmen and New Englanders in Maine and Nova Scotian lands and waters. A series of autonomous Indigenous maritime wars threatened the destruction of New England’s fishing fleets and caused an uproar in the British colonies. Indigenous maritime resistance ended only when British forces attacked Native communities on land. Subsequent treaty negotiations favored British expansion into the Indigenous maritime environment and legally extended English sovereignty over Native peoples in Maine and Nova Scotia, effectively drowning Native Americans’ maritime autonomy beneath the ocean’s waves.