Assessing the possible influence of human activities on sediment transport in the Saskatchewan River and its delta.

Sediment transport is a complex, multi-dimensional process. With the advancement in computing power and sophistication of computer applications over recent decades, it has become possible to conduct detailed analysis and simulations of soil erosion and sediment transport. The primary objective of this study was to examine and predict the potential influence of human activities on sediment transport.

Lateral spatial biases in naturalistic and simulated driving: Does pseudoneglect influence performance?

Whereas a rightward bump is more likely than a leftward bump when walking through a doorway, investigations into potential similar asymmetries for drivers are limited. The research presented here aims to determine the influence of innate lateral spatial biases when driving. Data from the Strategic Highway Research Program Naturalistic Driving Study (SHRP 2 NDS) and a driving simulation were used to address our research questions.

Which emphasis technique to use? Perception of emphasis techniques with varying distractors, backgrounds, and visualization types.

Emphasis effects are visual changes that make data elements distinct from their surroundings. Designers may use computational saliency models to predict how a viewer's attention will be guided by a specific effect; however, although saliency models provide a foundational understanding of emphasis perception, they only cover specific visual effects in abstract conditions. To address these limitations, we carried out crowdsourced studies that evaluate emphasis perception in a wider range of conditions than previously studied.

Exploiting High-Throughput Indoor Phenotyping to Characterize the Founders of a Structured Breeding Population.

Phenotyping is considered a significant bottleneck impeding fast and efficient crop improvement. Similar to many crops, , an internationally important oilseed crop, suffers from low genetic diversity, and will require exploitation of diverse genetic resources to develop locally adapted, high yielding and stress resistant cultivars. A pilot study was completed to assess the feasibility of using indoor high-throughput phenotyping (HTP), semi-automated image processing, and machine learning to capture the phenotypic diversity of agronomically important traits in a diverse breeding population, SKBnNAM, introduced here for the first time.

Visualization Tools for Genomic Conservation.

SynVisio and Accusyn ( genomevis.usask.ca ) are freely available web-based tools for visualizing genomic conservation that provide easy-to-access visualizations for researchers to interact with their datasets and change parameters in real time to carry out synteny exploration and analysis through multiple coordinated visual representations.

Multiple wheat genomes reveal global variation in modern breeding.

Advances in genomics have expedited the improvement of several agriculturally important crops but similar efforts in wheat (Triticum spp.) have been more challenging. This is largely owing to the size and complexity of the wheat genome, and the lack of genome-assembly data for multiple wheat lines.

Lateral biases in aesthetic and spatial location judgments: differences between tasks and native reading directions.

People exhibit consistent leftward spatial biases across a variety of tasks. However, individuals with a native reading direction other than left-to-right (LTR) show an attenuation of the leftward bias. The current study used procedurally similar tasks to examine spatial ability and aesthetic preferences in LTR and right-to-left (RTL) groups.

Examining preferences for website support to parents of adolescents with diabetes.

Diabetes can be stressful as parents seek optimal outcomes for their adolescent with type 1 diabetes. This study examined parents' interest and perspectives related to online diabetes resources. Based on a qualitative description approach, 14 qualitative group interviews were conducted with (i) parents of adolescents with diabetes (n = 29), and (ii) pediatric health care providers (n = 31).

Dorsal stream contributions to perceptual asymmetries.

Neurologically normal individuals show a bias toward the left side of space, referred to as pseudoneglect due to its similarity to clinical hemispatial neglect. The left bias appears to be stronger in the lower visual field during free-viewing, which could result from preferential dorsal stream processing. The current experiments used modified greyscales tasks, incorporating motion and isoluminant color, to explore whether targeting dorsal or ventral stream processing influenced the strength of the left bias.

Directional collisions during a route-following task.

Neurologically normal people tend to collide with objects on the right side more frequently than with objects located on the left side of space. This phenomenon could be attributable to pseudoneglect wherein individuals selectively attend to the left field. The current study investigated this effect using a virtual route-following task that was presented centrally, in the lower field, and in the upper field.

A collaborative document repository for home care teams.

Home care workers are mobile, work out of different locations, and have a high level of uncertainty in their schedules. This makes communication and information sharing difficult, and workers are often unable to account for others' activities when planning their own treatments. To address this issue, we developed and evaluated a clinical information system for home care that supports current paperwork practices and stores documents in a central repository that is accessible by all workers that treat a patient.

Men are more accurate than women in aiming at targets in both near space and extrapersonal space.

Men excel at motor tasks requiring aiming accuracy whereas women excel at different tasks requiring fine motor skill. However, these tasks are confounded with proximity to the body, as fine motor tasks are performed proximally and aiming tasks are directed at distal targets. As such, it is not known whether the male advantage on tasks requiring aiming accuracy is because men have better aim or is better in the proximal domain in which the task is usually presented.

Awareness-based scheduling in a home care clinical information system.

In home care, workers from different disciplines treat patients in their homes. However, workers who treat a shared patient are mobile and rarely see each other face-to-face, so it is difficult for them to maintain awareness of others' activities. In this paper, we discuss one aspect of these information limitations by considering how limited awareness of others' schedules influences work patterns in home care.

Female advantage for spatial location memory in both static and dynamic environments.

A female advantage has previously been found for spatial location tests of object memory. Previous studies have used static, 2-D tasks to test this advantage. This study used a computerized adaptation of the game Concentration to test object location memory in both a static and dynamic array of 24 pairs of line drawings.

Supporting collaboration in multidisciplinary home care teams.

Collaboration is an important part of healthcare delivery. However, in home care, collaboration is difficult due to the mobility and schedule variability of the workers. In this paper, we investigate the difficulties inherent in home care collaboration.