UVicSpace | Institutional Repository
UVicSpace is the University of Victoria’s open access scholarship and learning repository. It preserves and provides access to the digital scholarly works of UVic faculty, students, staff, and partners. Items in UVicSpace are organized into collections, each belonging to a community.
For more information about depositing items, see the Submission Guidelines.
Recent Submissions
Roll For perception: Games as a site of decolonization and social change
(2025) Riccitelli, Camryn; Rose-Redwood, Reuben Skye
Both tabletop and video games have immense potential to create opportunities for decolonization, education, and social change. They can be a highly engaging form of learning that allow players to deeply understand and connect with the games message or story, especially with complex and difficult subjects such as decolonization. They can create space and community for marginalized peoples (i.e. BIPOC, LGBTQ2+) and enable them to express themselves and tell their stories. This study explores how games created by or in collaboration with Indigenous and other marginalized peoples can challenge colonial values and binaries. Grounded in cultivation theory, which examines the lasting effects of media, the study draws upon semi-structured interviews with members of a local gaming community, the Galleon
Gaming Society, as well as online game reviews and statements to explore the game-player relationship and how players interact within and around the game space. Looking at the role games play in decolonization efforts will help unravel colonial structures within today’s games and make gaming a more inclusive and enriching experience.
Land temperature and hydrological conditions over B.C. in 2024
(Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 2025) Curry, Charles L.; Lang, Kristyn; Dah, Abigail
2024 was the second warmest year since 1940 in B.C., exceeded only by record warm temperatures in 2023. Snowpack increased from well below-normal to below-normal through the early winter, decreasing again to well below-normal by late spring. Compared to 2023 drought conditions were less severe overall; however, basins in the Northeast continued to experience extreme drought. The annual mean temperature in B.C. is increasing and can be distinguished from natural variability over the analyzed period of 1940-2024. Annual precipitation, however, exhibits no significant province-wide trend over that period.
A differential privacy-preserving data publishing algorithm for bus trajectory analysis: A case study on BC Transit
(2025) Bahari Neematabad, Mahboubeh; Lu, Yun
The increasing use of trajectory data in location-based services and public transit planning highlights the high analytical value of such data. However, legal, technical, and especially privacyrelated concerns have significantly limited public access to these datasets.
This thesis investigates privacy protection in trajectory databases—specifically, passenger movement data from public bus systems—under strong Differential Privacy (DP) guarantees.
We collaborate with BC Transit to make the first publicly available, privacy-preserving analysis of BC Transit’s bus tap dataset from Victoria, British Columbia. This work reviews existing DP mechanisms and selects two practical and applicable algorithms for public transit data. These mechanisms are then adapted and optimized to suit the unique characteristics of such data. The goal is to evaluate their practical effectiveness in privacy-preserving publication of transit data while maintaining the utility required for meaningful analysis.
The BC transit bus tap dataset (containing bus tap-ins) enables already-useful analyses such as count or sum queries (e.g., number of visits to a bus stop) used as the benchmark of several related works. However, we aim to demonstrate the power of the state-of-the-art—privacy-preserving trajectory analyses, and with approval from our collaborators at BC Transit, we construct a plausible synthetic trajectory dataset that corresponds to the original given tap dataset based on known weekly role-specific travel patterns. Two privacy-preserving algorithms are then applied:
• Noisy Prefix Tree (Rui Chen et al., 2011): A prefix tree-based DP algorithm for sequential data.
• PPDP (Yang Li et al., 2020): An improved prefix tree algorithm tailored for transit smart card data.
We also compare the count queries on the original data using the Laplace mechanism with those on the synthetic trajectories, to evaluate how well basic utility is preserved.
For sequential transit data, we introduce the following technical improvements to enhance the effectiveness of prefix tree-based methods:
• A spatio-temporal dimensionality reduction technique to sample noisy nodes with better efficiency;
• An improved post-processing method for achieving consistency in the noisy prefix tree after noise injection.
In addition, A hybrid privacy budget allocation approach is employed, which balances tree depth with the actual distribution of nodes at each level in a more intuitive and effective manner.
Experimental results—conducted on synthetic trajectories generated from real-world tap card data from the BC Transit system—demonstrate that this framework can enforce strong privacy guarantees
while answering complex transit-related analytical queries. This work serves as one of the first steps for data sharing among researchers, municipal agencies, and smart service developers, especially in BC, contributing to the design of more efficient, innovative, and human-centered public transportation systems.
Land temperature and hydrological conditions over B.C. in 2023
(Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 2024) Curry, Charles L.; Lang, Kristyn
In 2023, B.C. experienced record warm annual, summer and fall temperatures and well below-normal annual precipitation. Snowpack was generally below-normal through the winter, rapidly decreasing to well below-normal by June 1st due to early snowmelt across the province. In late summer and fall, severe drought conditions were experienced nearly everywhere in B.C., coinciding with record warm temperatures and below-normal precipitation. The trend in annual mean temperature in B.C. is positive and can be distinguished from natural variability over the analyzed period, 1950-2023. Annual precipitation, however, exhibits no significant trend over that period.
The relationship between squat jump force–velocity profiles and 2 km rowing ergometer performance across split intervals
(2025) Kussauer, Samson; Klimstra, Marc D.; Agar-Newman, Dana
Force–velocity profiling (FVP) provides a practical assessment of neuromuscular capabilities, yet its application to rowing performance remains underexplored. This study investigated the relationship between squat jump–derived FVP metrics and 250 m split performance during a 2 km rowing ergometer test in male varsity rowers. Sixteen athletes (age = 21.12 ± 1.68 y; height = 1.88 ± 0.07 m; body mass = 86.58 ± 9.47 kg) completed a 2 km ergometer trial followed by loaded squat jumps to determine maximal force (F₀), maximal velocity (V₀), maximal power (Pₘₐₓ), and the slope of the force–velocity
relationship (SFV). Linear regression analyses revealed that SFV significantly predicted power output across all race segments (r = −0.54 to −0.82), while F₀ significantly predicted all but the first segment (r = 0.51–0.83). Pₘₐₓ and V₀ showed no significant relationships with any segments. Across the race profile, the predictive strength of F₀ increased in later stages, suggesting that force production becomes more critical as fatigue accumulates. These findings highlight the utility of FVP, particularly F₀ and SFV, for monitoring mechanical capabilities relevant to sustained rowing performance and for informing strength-oriented training interventions.