The Nuxalk First Nations is being empowered by the provincial government to take more control over its socio and economic affairs. One critical part of the transitioning is to manage their forest resources through a community forest license. The Nuxalk Development Corporation will be an active participant in their economic future, particularly in the area of forest land management, energy planning, community development and the manufacturing of wood and non-wood products.
The proposed work will lead to mechanisms for reducing the negative effects of Cognitive Biases - automatic, unconscious elements of the human reasoning system known to cause decision errors. While the outcomes of Cognitive Biases have been studied for decades, there has been almost no research into how to reduce or eliminate their negative effects. The end goal of the proposed work is a suite of mechanisms that reliably, simply and cost-effectively accomplish such 'de-biasing' in a workplace setting.
In this project, the effects of storage time on the heating value of wood pellets are investigated. During relatively long-term storage and transportation, pellets may lose part of its heating value, which could translate to financial losses. However, for a limited and shorter storage time, studies have shown that pellets could have a slight gain in heating value. Thus, this project aims at resolving this ambiguity by conducting lab experiments and fitting the data to a mathematical model for prediction purposes.
The proposed research project will study processes which took place during formation of the copper-silver-gold deposit in the southern part of the Marshall Lake property, western Ontario. The study will focus on deciphering primary and metamorphic mineral assemblages and conditions of their origin. Studying mineral textures and their chemical and isotopic compositions will allow characterization of the processes which formed the deposit, including estimation of temperatures and pressures at which they took place.
The purpose of this project is to design a compact optical component that will be used in tandem with a display panel to use in Head-Up Display systems. The essence of the optical component design is the use of micro-lens arrays. Micro-lens arrays are thin, usually planar lenses composed of much smaller lens-lets with diameters usually in the order of 10 to 100 microns. Using micro-lens arrays, the optical system can be reduced to a couple of “sheets” of micro-lens arrays or less, allowing for compactness of the system.
The industry partner for this development internship is a company working in the area of Forestry and Agriculture Manufacturing located in Quesnel. The company is preparing to grow rapidly with a new product development (still in the R&D phase), market feasibility and commercialization aspects for the same. The new product being developed by the company- the VHCP (Van Horlick Cultivator Planter) is the next generation of mechanized tree planting systems.
It is this knowledge that Kamloops-based firm West Edge Engineering Ltd. was looking for when they approached UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering.
There, they were teamed up with Engineering Masters student Konrad Duerr, through a Mitacs-Accelerate internship.
Konrad worked on implementing seismic hazard assessment computer software at West Edge, allowing the company to carry out earthquake risk assessments on buildings – something they had not been able to do before the internship.
Having hosted Globalink students from India and Brazil at the CARIS Lab in 2010, 2011 and 2012, Dr. Croft was impressed by the strong work ethic and quick learning ability of the undergraduate visitors with whom she worked.
“Hosting a Globalink student helps my Masters and PhD students to learn and grow by giving them teaching and supervisory experience. But mostly, they gain from the diversity of experience and the different kinds of questions that our Globalink student brings every year.”
To make mining more efficient and environmentally friendly, transportation of rock should be minimized. Ideally we would only transport those rocks that contain economically extractable amounts of minerals. MineSense has developed sensors that can detect the level of minerals in rocks and, in particular, can detect very low levels with high accuracy. This proposal is to use MineSense's sensing technology to make decisions about which rocks to keep, and which to discard, as they pass over an array of sensors via a moving belt.
The Sorensen laboratory-based Childhood Cancer Research Program is specifically focused on elucidating the genetic and biological determinants of the metastatic process in childhood cancer. Metastatic disease remains the single most dominant driver of adverse outcome in most childhood cancers, particularly in childhood sarcomas. There are two basic strategies in the program for studying metastatic disease in childhood cancers. The first is to focus on cell stress signaling.
