Reaction All Years

Project Description:

Tattoos have been around for millennia, from Otzi the Ice Man’s sixty-one tattoos to Ed Hardy’s modern flash designs. Tattoos have been integrated into people’s lives as a deep, personal form of meaning-making. What we mean by this is that individuals may use tattoos to make sense of life events that have happened to them.

Tattooed Resilience came from a larger project on Violence and Resilience funded by SSHRC’s College and Community Social Innovation Fund, in partnership with the Victim Justice Network. Thus, our client is a social innovation project with a community partner.

When reviewing the qualitative data from the interviews of this larger study, there were some compelling narratives about tattoos when the participants shared their stories. Our project investigated the motivations that victims and survivors of violence had for acquiring tattoos related to their victimization, and how tattoos may offer a non-traditional form of healing.

We identified six participants’ interviews that self-disclosed tattoos as related to their victimization. The participant’s victimization history included homicide, domestic abuse, and sexual abuse.

Our analysis involved examining the interviews for prominent themes, and then using themes from previous research on tattoos as a non-traditional method of healing to inform our analysis. The outcome of this work resulted in six main themes: memorialization, communication, autonomy, permanence, self-injury, and spirituality.

The majority of participants acquired tattoos to memorialize loved ones that were homicide victims. One participant had their loved one’s ashes in the ink. Tattoos also allowed participants to communicate their ordeal to others through general inquiry about their tattoo. Another participant noted the word ‘survivor’ being tattooed on them represented reclamation of their autonomy in the aftermath of victimization. Tattoos also helped as a positive coping mechanism to refrain from self-injury, and were connected to participant’s spirituality.

The analysis was challenging for us because there is a lack of literature on tattoos and non-traditional healing. Also, this was the first time we used qualitative methods to analyze interviews. At times, we had concerns about ethical guidelines of confidentiality. It was important to not reveal identifiable information about participants in our work.

Next, we drafted a manuscript of our findings in preparation for a peer-reviewed journal publication, which was also challenging. Writing for publication is not the same as for a school assignment, and we had to learn how to write for academic reviewers.

Currently, we are working on revising our draft to be able to submit to a peer-reviewed journal, with the goal of having our paper published. From the outcomes of the six themes we found, we conclude that tattoos offered a non-traditional form of healing, allowed participants to reclaim their bodies in the aftermath of crime, are an important component of the participant’s narratives, allowed participants to make sense of their ordeal, and are a form of resilience. Thus, there is a need for further research into this field, and society should view non-traditional healing with a more humanistic perspective.

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Project Description:

As a signatory to the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol, Canada has a responsibility to fight climate change by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. There are several major sources of GHG emissions. Of these, the transportation sectors of developed countries account for approximately 28% of total global emissions. In Canada, the transportation industry generates 10% of its overall GHG emissions. Reducing emissions generated from road-freight can therefore aid in achieving the Paris and Kyoto climate-change goals.
Canada Post Corporation (CPC), one of Canada’s largest organizations and a crown corporation, relies heavily on transportation. Canada Post’s 2019 Sustainability Report states that they have set an ambitious goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Unfortunately, the same report shows that, in 2019, their GHG emissions increased by 5% compared to 2018. In 2020, Canada Post delivered more than 6.4 billion pieces of mail, parcels, and messages. Its value chain transportation network is connected by 21 major processing plants, 477 letter carrier depots, and 6,084 post offices. This network is responsible for 85% of the total GHG emitted by CPC.
Since trains emit approximately 75% less GHG emissions than trucks, rail seems the most viable option to reduce emissions–especially for long-haul deliveries. This research aims to help CPC investigate the implications of a switch to intermodal transportation, where a combination of road and rail can be used to transport mail. The biggest obstacle to making this move is the time sensitivity (also referred to as Delivery Standards) of transporting parcels from origin to destination. Therefore, this project aims to answer the following research question: “Can CPC’s parcel transportation network be redesigned to accommodate re-routing parcels via rail, maintain the Delivery Standards previously established, and in turn reduce overall GHG emissions?”. Specifically, which lanes (origin/destination) are eligible to use intermodal transportation? What percentage of parcel volume should be moved to rail?
To answer this question, five main objectives have been developed:
(i) Provide a detailed description of the mode of transportation of Canada Post and the advantages/disadvantages of each mode for Canada Post’s different products.
(ii) Provide a background study regarding rail and road intermodal transportation in supply chain networks, specifically postal services.
(iii) Analyze opportunities and risks associated with a road-to-rail intermodal shift.
(iv) Construct an analytical network design process that will facilitate decision-making to determine whether the parcel volume can be moved on rail or not for various routes; and
(v) Validate the decision-making framework using real data from a “typical” lane in the Canada Post network.
This research aims to provide Canada Post with alternative network design options to move more parcels from road to rail and reverse the emissions trend. Furthermore, by moving more volumes to rail, the added advantage of reducing transportation costs makes Canada Post more competitive.

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Project Description:

Transportation is a key logistics function of supply chains and an important driver of supply chain performance. It enables the movement of goods and materials from suppliers through to customers (B2C) or stores (B2B). Given the complexity of this function, businesses usually opt to outsource this function to third-party logistics (3PL) service providers like Dicom that specialize in transportation. Small to mid-sized businesses do not have large enough volumes to fill a truck and use dedicated Less-Than-Truckload (LTL) services, so 3PL firms have considered the possible benefits of combining LTL and parcels to fill a truckload. A parcel shipment can be an individual parcel that occupies a fraction of the truck space, while an LTL shipment can consist of a single or several pallets but do not take up the space allocated for a full truck load. In addition to their weight and dimensional differences, parcels are usually much more time-sensitive and are more commonly B2C deliveries, while an LTL shipment is usually a less time-sensitive B2B service.

The challenge for 3PLs is to minimize the empty space in trucks by allocating an optimum amount of capacity to the mix of LTL and parcel loads to accumulate as much volume as possible. Currently, many carrier companies prefer to manage the LTL and parcel services with separate and dedicated fleets, because consolidation can cause delays, and as a result, a time-sensitive parcel may miss its delivery date. This current lack of consolidation, however, results in much higher transportation costs per item. Therefore, the main research problem becomes: how to model and improve the allocation of the existing transportation capacity among LTL and Parcel customers while maximizing the expected revenue? The following objectives were developed to answer the research question: (i) Give a detailed description of the LTL and parcel business and the challenges faced by 3PLs, (ii) Provide a literature survey of the existing solutions similar industries and businesses, (iii) Construct an analytical model based on revenue management methodology to allocate LTL and parcels in the same transportation fleet optimally, and (iv) Validate the model by using simulation tools and real data from Dicom.

The proposed research project has benefits to Dicom, to Canadian industry, and to the environment. Firstly, it helps Dicom enhance the efficiency and profitability of its transportation network by supporting Dicom’s transportation capacity allocation decisions to avoid unnecessary investments required for their transportation capacity expansion. Furthermore, using the outcomes of this study, Dicom can increase the volume in its transportation network while improving capacity utilization and maximizing revenue. Secondly, from an industry perspective, this can be used as a model to spend less money on supply chain and logistic networks. Finally, from an environmental perspective, this research project lowers truck emissions and reduces Greenhouse Gas Emissions as increasing the individual capacity of each truck trip means that fewer trucks are needed overall.

Ultimately, this research project provided a great opportunity for students to identify the issues and strategies of private sector supply chain management. Students learned how to apply their theoretical knowledge from courses to a real business problem. Students were also able to improve their analytical skills by conducting simulation and optimization scenarios.

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Project Description:

Energy generation and its consumption nowadays are one of the main concerns of worldwide societies. According to Natural Resources Canada, about 82% of the GHG (greenhouse gases) emissions come from energy. While 64% of the total energy used in the residential sector is consumed due to space heating and cooling.

The project investigates the energy performance of a 100 sq.ft. real-scale test shed constructed by Building Science students. The test shed is equipped with a sustainable in-floor heating and cooling hydronic system using Uponor PEX piping and designed to include three closed loops: in-floor hydronic system, solar heating system powered by vacuum tube collector and future geothermal cooling system that includes ground heat exchanger (please see the layout of the systems).

The in-floor hydronic heating system was installed as a part of Uponor – Algonquin College project that aimed to investigate the performance of Uponor PEX piping application at the radiant heating systems. The industrial partner (Uponor Ltd.) has a particular interest in assessing energy efficiency, thermal comfort, usage efficiency, regulatory compliance, and ease of installation and maintenance of their product. The main aim of the hydronic part of the project is to help the industrial partner demonstrate and market the superiority of its PEX products and solutions by providing Uponor Ltd. with a detailed analysis of the results from the future system testing.

Initially, the project design involved only a hydronic heating system powered by a solar collector. However, the testing of heating system can be carried out only during cold periods, which means that the system can be valuably tested only during late autumn, winter, and earlier spring. For this reason, it was decided to add to the design a geothermal loop with a ground heat exchanger that will allow examining the hydronic system also for the cooling application during the summer.

So far, there are only two loops are being installed in the shed – solar and In-floor hydronic systems – with the pre-installed 3-way valves that will allow connecting the geothermal loop in the future. The geothermal loop design was done according to the research on similar systems and validated with the help of software such as LoopCAD (hydronic system design and simulation of performance), Energy2D and ANSYS (heat transfer simulation for obtaining the size of ground heat exchanger loop). The further steps will be to test the solar heating system during the upcoming cold period as well as complete the installation of the geothermal loop.

In addition to evaluating the heating/cooling system, the shed’s changeable wall panels that designed in a way to facilitate testing the effect of different details and composition of wall assembly on the building envelope performance. Furthermore, a series of various building envelope tests- such as blower door test, already completed, and infrared thermography- will assist in analyzing the energy performance of the shed as a complete unit.

All the testing opportunities that this equipped shed provides will enable college students and professors to perform a regular range of repeatable applied research activities to test, analyze, and benchmark the performance and effectiveness of the systems used in this project as well as to connect them with the building envelope performance.

The project is sponsored and made possible by the office of Applied Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Uponor Ltd (PEX), and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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Project Description:

The project consists in create a real life scenario where the user will have the opportunity to choose their own answers through the virtual simulation game, providing the user a full experience on how to do perform CPR assistance, when needed. During the Teaching Mode the user will have the opportunity to learn all the necessary skills to proceed with the Game Mode, where the user will be put on a test on a real time decision making context, from a multi answer platform choosing their own adventure during the development of the game.

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Project Description:

The project is intended to detect the location of a fault in underground cable lines from the base station in kilo meters.
In the urban areas, the electrical cables run underground instead of running overhead. Whenever any fault occurs within the underground cable, it becomes difficult to detect the exact location of the fault for the process of repairing that particular cable. The proposed system finds the point of the exact location of the fault. We can see the fault location on LED display and by receiving SMS on our phone using GSM and GPS module.

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Project Description:

The Blackburn Community Association Website is a hub for a wide range of community focused information and services. The website provides up-to-date information on community issues, events and news. It’s online booking system also allows users to book the local community hall. Users are able to create accounts and log on as members.

Three subsites provide additional information and services to the Blackburn Hamlett community:

BANAR: A website for the local community magazine. Site will include release dates, advertising information, article submission deadlines and digital copies of past issues. ​

Blackburn Hamlett Business Directory: Provides information on local businesses. Businesses can login to manage their content. Businesses must be approved by site admin.  

Blackburn Hamlett Funfair: Displays information on upcoming events, photos from previous events and programs. Users can register as volunteers through the website.

All websites have been built from the ground up with a focus on providing a smooth end-user experience. There are a range of accessibility features for users with visual impairments, such as increasing text size, adjustable color and contrast settings, and the ability to change the font type of text.

The websites have a contemporary and professional design that is consistent across all four sites. They have a responsive mobile-friendly layout that ensures that they will look great on any screen size.

Security features such as requiring ReCAPTCHA on log in means that the website is secured from attacking by brute force log in.

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Project Description:

This system aims at replacing the conventional parking system with an IoT-based smart parking system by using RFID (radio-frequency identification).
The users will be provided an entry card for getting access to the parking slot. The users will also be provided with an android based mobile application, using which they can know about the availability of the parking slot on their cell phones.
The users will need to maintain a minimum amount of balance in their entry card for getting access through the parking system, otherwise, the system will deny the access to enter. In this way, this smart parking system will help reduce human effort & time by using automation technology.

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Project Description:

insightScope, a web application that helps researchers manage and conduct crowdsourced systematic and scoping reviews was started as a collaboration of Algonquin students from SLiDE 2018 led by Sanket Patel and a team of researchers from the CHEO PICU; Dr. Dayre McNally MD, as well as Research Coordinators Katie O’Hearn MSc and Misty Pratt MES. Since its inception, insightScope strived to revolutionize and accelerate the process for a systematic review; originally performed by small single digit teams of investigators over long periods of time. Using researchers from around the world that have been appraised on our system, insightScope can provide a crowdsourced approach; vastly accelerating the process, from months and years down to weeks.
Over the past term, our insightScope team made up of the most recent collaboration of Algonquin Students from SLiDE and CHEO, had been working hard towards finalizing many new and invigorating updates to the front and backend of the application. Among these updates includes a dashboard to view the Project Overview and Timeline for a systematic review. This dashboard will enable principal investigators and researchers to promote their projects, view statistics about their level of contribution, and receive live updates. Creation of this dashboard is critical to the next stage of insightScope. Currently armed with our accelerated review capability we aim to begin integrating systematic reviews into the tens to hundreds of thousands of medical conferences hosted annually worldwide. Merging systematic reviews into these medical conferences provides a sensational opportunity to augment the conferences scholarly output. Providing a novel educational and networking opportunity to researchers in attendance and internationally.
Our Algonquin student team has been provided with many exciting opportunities to expand their skillsets. Being able to use many different technologies from Amazon Web Services and by participating in and developing large scale redesigns to core features of the site like the Title & Abstract and Data Abstraction stages of systematic reviews; our team was able to open themselves to many different areas of development. By exposing ourselves to cloud document storage with AWS S3, online sessions with Memcached, different types of web application security protocols and how to optimize memory and efficiency when developing for these worldwide userbases.
To ensure the delivery of a superior product, our Algonquin Team has been closely collaborating with the CHEO team to ensure efficacy of these features. Though as we know collaboration during the worldwide pandemic caused by Covid-19 comes with its own set of struggles. From the different types of bugs that could appear, discussions about new designs and features, and learning new technologies our team had a lot on our plate; too much for everyone alone and separated. Though with an agile development mindset in hand, we were able to better manage ourselves. With many online design sessions and constant communication our team was able to handle any problem that was thrown at us. Through this entire process we acquired many invaluable skills and experiences that aided us to accomplish our goals.

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Project Description:

Every year, changes to the curriculum for courses at Algonquin College are made or considered. Feedback from students, Algonquin faculty members, and industry professionals is used to determine what changes should be made to improve each course. The client has asked for a web application that allows users to share their opinions and have the related faculty members for each course review the feedback. At the end of term, students at Algonquin may access the web application for a limited period and leave a review on courses that they have successfully completed. Throughout each year, Algonquin staff members may also leave reviews on relevant courses and input comments on behalf of industry professionals’ recommendations.

To fulfill the requirements, a web application was developed using Python for the back end, Django as a web framework, MySQL for database connection, and React for the front-end UI components. Only Algonquin staff and students may use this application with their algonquinlive.com email addresses. The project is ongoing and, in the future, single sign-on (SSO) will be integrated with Algonquin systems. Currently the application features a sign-up feature that requires users to sign up with an algonquinlive.com email address. Users may sign up as either staff or students and once they are registered, they may select a course that is relevant to them. Both staff and students may leave reviews and staff have the additional option to view all reviews for courses relevant to them. The staff review page provides a summary of the reviews left for courses and allows staff members to scroll through a list of user comments.

By taking on this project, the team has learned about many technologies new to them and how to work in a group development environment. None of the team was especially proficient with any of the technologies used to develop the project however, team members conducted research, experimented with code, and successfully implemented many working features. In addition, the team followed Agile software development methodologies and realized the many benefits of incremental development of working prototypes over the traditional waterfall development model.

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