Urban Policy And Heritage Planning: The Disproportionate Designation Of Heritage Conservation Districts (HCDs) In The City Of Toronto

<div>This Major Research Paper (MRP) examines the disproportionate designation of Heritage Conservation Districts (HCDs) within the City of Toronto, which are predominantly located in the City's downtown core, compared to the City's inner suburban areas. To illustrate the discrepancies in HCD designation, two potential HCDs in Scarborough, one of three inner suburbs in Toronto, are chronologically examined. Both Agincourt and Midland Park’s HCD represent the most recent examples of heritage designation in the inner suburb, which stands as the only area in the City that has zero HCDs. Before the case studies are discussed, the effects of Toronto's 1998 amalgamation, select timeframes of the City's planning history and recent changes to Provincial planning legislation that govern municipalities' heritage approach are examined. It is determined that a series of factors contribute to the disproportionate designation of HCDs in the City of Toronto. These factors include the incremental designation of heritage properties post amalgamation, the lengthy heritage designation process, the intergovernmental nature of municipal heritage policies, the lack of public education on the benefits of heritage and a complex HCD prioritization process all contribute to the disproportionate designation of HCD’s in the City of Toronto. Four key recommendations are offered to help resolve the heritage designation issue in the City of Toronto.</div><div><br></div><div>Keywords: Heritage Conservation Districts; Toronto; Urban Planning, Urban Policy, Heritage Urbanism.</div>

Urban Policy And Heritage Planning: The Disproportionate Designation Of Heritage Conservation Districts (HCDs) In The City Of Toronto

<div>This Major Research Paper (MRP) examines the disproportionate designation of Heritage Conservation Districts (HCDs) within the City of Toronto, which are predominantly located in the City's downtown core, compared to the City's inner suburban areas. To illustrate the discrepancies in HCD designation, two potential HCDs in Scarborough, one of three inner suburbs in Toronto, are chronologically examined. Both Agincourt and Midland Park’s HCD represent the most recent examples of heritage designation in the inner suburb, which stands as the only area in the City that has zero HCDs. Before the case studies are discussed, the effects of Toronto's 1998 amalgamation, select timeframes of the City's planning history and recent changes to Provincial planning legislation that govern municipalities' heritage approach are examined. It is determined that a series of factors contribute to the disproportionate designation of HCDs in the City of Toronto. These factors include the incremental designation of heritage properties post amalgamation, the lengthy heritage designation process, the intergovernmental nature of municipal heritage policies, the lack of public education on the benefits of heritage and a complex HCD prioritization process all contribute to the disproportionate designation of HCD’s in the City of Toronto. Four key recommendations are offered to help resolve the heritage designation issue in the City of Toronto.</div><div><br></div><div>Keywords: Heritage Conservation Districts; Toronto; Urban Planning, Urban Policy, Heritage Urbanism.</div>

Qualitative Exploration of the ‘Rolling Unmasking Effect’ for Downwind Odor Dispersion from a Model Animal Source

Solving environmental odor issues can be confounded by many analytical, technological, and socioeconomic factors. Considerable know-how and technologies can fail to properly identify odorants responsible for the downwind nuisance odor and, thereby, focus on odor mitigation strategies. We propose enabling solutions to environmental odor issues utilizing troubleshooting techniques developed for the food, beverage, and consumer products industries. Our research has shown that the odorant impact-priority ranking process can be definable and relatively simple. The initial challenge is the prioritization of environmental odor character from the perspective of the impacted citizenry downwind. In this research, we utilize a natural model from the animal world to illustrate the rolling unmasking effect (RUE) and discuss it more systematically in the context of the proposed environmental odorant prioritization process. Regardless of the size and reach of an odor source, a simplification of odor character and composition typically develops with increasing dilution downwind. An extreme odor simplification-upon-dilution was demonstrated for the prehensile-tailed porcupine (P.T. porcupine); its downwind odor frontal boundary was dominated by a pair of extremely potent character-defining odorants: (1) ‘onion’/‘body odor’ and (2) ‘onion’/‘grilled’ odorants. In contrast with the outer-boundary simplicity, the near-source assessment presented considerable compositional complexity and composite odor character difference. The ultimate significance of the proposed RUE approach is the illustration of naturally occurring phenomena that explain why some environmental odors and their sources can be challenging to identify and mitigate using an analytical-only approach (focused on compound identities and concentrations). These approaches rarely move beyond comprehensive lists of volatile compounds emitted by the source. The novelty proposed herein lies in identification of those few compounds responsible for the downwind odor impacts and requiring mitigation focus.

Prioritizing risks with composition of probabilistic preferences and weighting of FMEA criteria for fast decision-making in complex scenarios

PurposeThis study aims to develop a risk prioritization process using failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) in association with composition of probabilistic preferences (CPP) and weighting the risk analysis criteria. It seeks to develop decision-making considering the fast response necessary to achieve project objectives in complex scenarios, such as the pandemic of COrona VIrus Disease 19 (COVID-19).Design/methodology/approachAfter identifying the risks, the prioritization process was applied to a project in the oil and gas area, in which a focus group assessed these risks. This evaluation took place employing traditional FMEA, FMEA with CPP by axes considering four points of view and FMEA with CPP by weighted sum with the use of a multicriteria method to weight the criteria. These approaches were compared to understand their differences and benefits, with a flow chart being developed, consolidating the procedure.FindingsThe methodologies that showed the greatest benefits were FMEA with CPP by axes PO (progressive-optimistic) and by weighted sum. Essentially, this was mainly related to the interrelationship between risks and to the importance of prioritization.Originality/valueThis procedure can consider company's views on what is critical and the interrelationship between risks. It provides a clear segmentation of what should and should not be prioritized. It was also developed in a practical case, showing a possible alternative to support fast responses in decision-making.

Towards a Semi-Automated Data-Driven Requirements Prioritization Approach for Reducing Stakeholder Participation in SPL Development

Requirements prioritization (RP), part of Requirements engineering (RE), is an essential activity of Software Product-Lines (SPL) paradigm. Similar to standard systems, the identification and prioritization of the user needs are relevant to the software quality and challenging in SPL due to common requirements, increasing dependencies, and diversity of stakeholders involved. As prioritization process might become impractical when the number of derived products grows, recently there has been an exponential growth in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in different areas of RE. The present research aims to propose a semi-automatic multiple-criteria prioritization process for functional and non-functional requirements (FR/NFR) of software projects developed within the SPL paradigm for reducing stakeholder participation.

A Data Mining Technique to Improve Configuration Prioritization Framework for Component-Based Systems: An Empirical Study

Department of Software Engineering, In the current application development strategies, families of productsare developed with personalized configurations to increase stakeholders’ satisfaction. Product lines have theability to address several requirements due to their reusability and configuration properties. The structuringand prioritizing of configuration requirements facilitate the development processes, whereas it increases theconflicts and inadequacies. This increases human effort, reducing user satisfaction, and failing to accommodatea continuous evolution in configuration requirements. To address these challenges, we propose a framework formanaging the prioritization process considering heterogeneous stakeholders priority semantically. Featuresare analyzed, and mined configuration priority using the data mining method based on frequently accessed andchanged configurations. Firstly, priority is identified based on heterogeneous stakeholder’s perspectives usingthree factors functional, experiential, and expressive values. Secondly, the mined configuration is based on frequentlyaccessed or changed configuration frequency to identify the new priority for reducing failures or errorsamong configuration interaction. We evaluated the performance of the proposed framework with the help ofan experimental study and by comparing it with analytical hierarchical prioritization (AHP) and Clustering.The results indicate a significant increase (more than 90 percent) in the precision and the recall value of theproposed framework, for all selected cases.

Vulnerability Management Models Using a Common Vulnerability Scoring System

Vulnerability prioritization is an essential element of the vulnerability management process in data communication networks. Accurate prioritization allows the attention to be focused on the most critical vulnerabilities and their timely elimination; otherwise, organizations may face severe financial consequences or damage to their reputations. In addition, the large amounts of data generated by various components of security systems further impede the process of prioritizing the detected vulnerabilities. Therefore, the detection and elimination of critical vulnerabilities are challenging tasks. The solutions proposed for this problem in the scientific literature so far—e.g., PatchRank, SecureRank, Vulcon, CMS, VDNF, or VEST—are not sufficient because they do not consider the context of the organization. On the other hand, commercial solutions, such as Nessus, F-Secure, or Qualys, do not provide detailed information regarding the prioritization procedure, except for the scale. Therefore, in this paper, the authors present an open-source solution called the Vulnerability Management Center (VMC) in order to assist organizations with the vulnerability prioritization process. The VMC presents all calculated results in a standardized way by using a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), which allows security analysts to fully understand environmental components’ influences on the criticality of detected vulnerabilities. In order to demonstrate the benefits of using the the open-source VMC software developed here, selected models of a vulnerability management process using CVSS are studied and compared by using three different, real testing environments. The open-source VMC suite developed here, which integrates information collected from an asset database, is shown to accelerate the process of removal for the critical vulnerabilities that are detected. The results show the practicability and efficacy of the selected models and the open-source VMC software, which can thus reduce organizations’ exposure to potential threats.

Methodology for adaptation of the ASH Guidelines for Management of Venous Thromboembolism for the Latin American context

Background: From 2017 to 2020, the American Society of Hematology (ASH) collaborated with 12 hematology societies in Latin America to adapt the ASH guidelines on venous thromboembolism (VTE). Objective: To describe the methods used to adapt the ASH guidelines on venous thromboembolism. Methods: Each society nominated 1 individual to serve on the guideline panel. The work of the panel was facilitated by the 2 methodologists. The methods team selected 4 of the original VTE guidelines for a first round. To select the most relevant questions, a 2-step prioritization process was conducted through an on-line survey and then through in-person discussion. During an in-person meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 23 April through 26 April 2018, the panel developed recommendations using the ADOLOPMENT approach. Evidence about health effects from the original guidelines was reused, but important data about resource use, accessibility, feasibility, and impact in health equity were added. Results: In the guideline accompanying this paper, Latin American panelists selected 17 questions from an original pool of 49. Of the 17 questions addressed, substantial changes were introduced for 5 recommendations, and remarks were added or modified for 12 recommendations. Conclusions: By using the evidence from an international guideline, a significant amount of work and time were saved; by adding regional evidence, the final recommendations were tailored to the Latin American context. This experience offers an alternative to develop guidelines relevant to local contexts through a global collaboration.

Prioritizing failure risks of components based on information axiom for product redesign considering fuzzy and random uncertainties

The prioritization of the failure risks of the components in an existing product is critical for product redesign decision-making considering various uncertainties. Two issues need to be addressed in the failure risk prioritization process. One is the evaluation of the failure risk considering each failure mode for each component. Currently, many failure mode effects and analysis (FMEA) methods based on fuzzy logic seldom deal with the randomness in failure mode occurrence during the product operation stage. Therefore, in this research, the information axiom is extended to calculate the information contents of risk indices considering these two types of uncertainty. The second issue is the evaluation of the degree of failure risk for each of the components. The weighted sum of information content considering all failure modes is used to assess the risk of components based on a fuzzy logarithmic least squares method (FLLSM). Additionally, a case study to prioritize the failure risks of various components in a crawler crane is implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed approach.

Assessment of the alignment between research funding allocation and consensus research priority areas in kidney cancer.

e16538 Background: Finite resources are available to fund research, and it is important to ensure stakeholder input is identified and prioritized. In this light, the KCRNC and CIHR sponsored a consensus-based priority-setting partnership that brought together a group of patients, caregivers, and clinicians to identify the top 10 research priorities in kidney cancer (Table), with a consensus document published in 2017. The final step of the prioritization process was to determine how research funding allocation has aligned with these previously identified priority areas. We report the results of this assessment. Methods: We queried publicly available Canadian and American research databases to identify all research funds allocated to kidney cancer from 2018-2020. Each funded project was assessed to determine which priority areas were addressed. We evaluated the percent of projects and percent of funding dollars (converted to USD) allocated to priority areas. Projects were stratified by country, type of research (basic science/translational or clinical), and cancer stage of focus (localized and/or metastatic). Results: A total of 121 kidney cancer research projects were funded between 2018-2020, with 15 Canadian projects (total $ = 1,906,398 USD) and 106 American projects (total $ = 56,317,386 USD). Most projects were basic science or translational (88%). Half (50%) of the projects focused on localized cancer while 26% of projects focused on metastatic kidney cancer. Overall, 49% of projects aligned to one priority area, 47% of projects aligned to multiple priority areas, and 4% of projects were not aligned to priority areas. The priority areas which received the most funding were causes of kidney cancer (priority #10, 64% of funds), biomarkers (priorities #1b+1c+5, 59%), and immunotherapies (priority #4, 41%)(Table). Unfunded priority areas were supportive care (priority #6) and the role of biopsy in kidney cancer management (priority #8). Conclusions: Nearly all kidney cancer projects funded since 2018 were aligned with one or multiple stakeholder-identified research priority areas, although some priority areas remain underfunded. Mechanisms to improve distribution of funding to all priority areas may be warranted.[Table: see text]