Thursday, December 2, 2021

GreenHouse announces Social Impact Fund fall term winners

A message from St. Paul's GreenHouse.

The Social Impact Showcase celebrates the amazing work that GreenHouse students have accomplished throughout their social innovation journeys. Four out of the seven student teams that pitched last week were awarded funding to support their ventures from the Social Impact Fund, established by St. Paul’s University College.

This term students focused their ventures on solar energy, physical and mental health issues and career education and experience for high schoolers.

And the winners are…

Aqua-Cell Energy, awarded $7,500, is a start-up focused on providing cost-effective solar energy storage for businesses and is led by Keith Cleland, Faculty of Engineering.

Mattrics, awarded $3,000, is designing a non-invasive mat that records body metrics during sleep, so occupational therapists can craft custom and effective solutions to meet the sleep needs of children with Cerebral Palsy. Members of the Mattrics team includes 5 upper year Faculty of Engineering students: Ayesha Ebrahim, Sophy Li, Julie Lee, Sumaiya Islam and Danielle Seunarine.

iContribute, awarded $2,500, is a mobile app that empowers high school students to discover meaningful opportunities and gain career-related experience. iContribute’s team is led by Mesha Naidoo-Edwardson - Faculty of Math, HaoHao Du and Umai Balendra – who are both enrolled in Computer Science at Carleton University.

Cocoon, awarded $1,000 for winning the People’s Choice Award, is a platform aimed to care for caregivers by providing resources and supports. Cocoon is led Kinza Ahmed – Faculty of Science and Isra Ziad – Faculty of Health.

Congratulations to all the students who participated in the Fall 2021 Social Impact Showcase and thank you to over 300 community members who took the time to vote for their favourite venture. Here’s to our students’ continued success moving forward.

Bullet Time? How about Coffee Time: caffeine improves reaction to moving targets

In the first study of its kind to explore caffeine’s effects on dynamic visual skills, researchers concluded that caffeine increases alertness and detection accuracy for moving targets. Caffeine also improved participants’ reaction times.

“A lot of what happens in our environment is moving—like trying to cross a busy intersection as a pedestrian or finding something on a shelf as you’re walking through the aisles of a grocery store,” said Dr. Kristine Dalton of Waterloo’s School of Optometry & Vision Science. “Testing visual acuity under dynamic conditions can provide more information about our functional performance in these scenarios than traditional static visual acuity measurements alone.”

Visual acuity, also known as clarity of vision or sharpness of vision, refers to a person’s ability to detect and recognize small details and can be measured under static (stationary) or dynamic (moving) conditions. While both static and dynamic visual acuity provide important information about how we interact with the world around us, dynamic visual acuity skills are especially important in the many daily activities in which we, or objects around us are moving. 

“While we already know that caffeine increases the velocity of rapid-eye movements, we wanted to further investigate how exactly caffeine enhances visual processing and facilitates the detection of moving visual stimuli by testing dynamic visual acuity,” said co-author Beatríz Redondo of the University of Granada’s Department of Optics.

On two separate days, half of the study’s participants ingested a caffeine capsule (4mg/kg) while the other half ingested a placebo capsule. Using a computer-based test designed and validated at the University of Waterloo, each participant’s dynamic visual acuity skills were measured before and 60 minutes after caffeine ingestion. 

Researchers found that participants who had ingested the caffeine capsules showed significantly greater accuracy and faster speed when identifying smaller moving stimuli, inferring caffeine positively influences participants’ stimulus processing and decision-making. Eye movement velocity and contrast sensitivity, which are implicated in dynamic visual acuity performance, were also sensitive to caffeine intake.

“Our findings show that caffeine consumption can actually be helpful for a person’s visual function by enhancing alertness and feelings of wakefulness,” Dalton said.  “This is especially true for those critical, everyday tasks, like driving, riding a bike or playing sports, that require us to attend to detailed information in moving objects when making decisions.”

The study, Effects of caffeine ingestion on dynamic visual acuity, co-authored by Waterloo’s School of Optometry & Vision Science’s Dalton, and the University of Granada’s Redondo, Raimundo Jiménez, Rubén Molina and Jesús Vera, was recently published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Social media revenue sharing means you could profit from every post

By Patty Mah. This article was originally published on the School of Accounting and Finance website.

Web surfers googling questions can receive the answers they’re looking mostly for free. With the digitization of content new business models and opportunities to generate revenue such as subscription-based and pay-per-item models are becoming more popular. Digital content consumers may soon need to empty our pockets to get timely answers from well-sourced and respected digital contributors.

A collaborative study by researchers from the universities of Waterloo, Oklahoma, Auckland, and Zhejiang Gongshang, determined that Facebook, Twitter, and potentially other less than profitable social media platforms can migrate from an ad-based revenue model to a paid question and answer (Q&A) model. Theophanis Stratopoulos, associate professor at the University of Waterloo and his group found that successful platforms such as Weibo Q&A, utilize a model that generates revenue from paid viewership within a paid Q&A platform where the askers, answerers, and the platform share in the profits. This unique revenue sharing model among all stakeholders ensures the sustainability of the social media platform and incentivizes both the askers and answerers to contribute quality content and heightens the engagement of viewers and their content purchasing.

“Imagine if nobody posted content on Facebook,” notes Stratopoulos. “We visit social media platforms because we want to consume content produced by other users. Yet, under the existing model, Facebook contributors are not compensated for their work.”

This study is one of the first to validate the direct positive impact of social media status and social endorsement on the sales of paid viewership. Prior to this study, understanding of digital content consumption had primarily been focused on the free content model. Understanding of the drivers of the sales of paid viewership is a crucial component to leveraging and developing viable content monetization models. The collaborative study looked at the unique design features that differentiate the paid Q&A models from the free models – question price and content perishability. In a paid Q&A platform, users pay a viewership fee and revenues from the sales of viewership fees are shared among the stakeholders. The research provided a more nuanced understanding of how question price and content perishability alters viewers’ payment decisions.

“Our study examines a scenario where revenue sharing is beneficial for contributors and social media platforms,” explains Stratopoulos. “Content within social medial platforms tend to behave like hot cookies. They sell better when they’re fresh creating a constant need to entice users to provide new content. Currently, users have no monetary incentive to provide new content.”

While the social media status of an answerer can have a significant effect on the sales of paid viewership, it is critical for the digital content platform to build effective status-ranking mechanisms that can verify the answerer’s social identity and integrity. Interactions and endorsements from other users also affect the sales of paid viewership as more viewers engage and interact to raise content awareness.

“The idea that a user who posts on Facebook, Instagram or any other social media platform should receive a payment representing their contribution to the company’s revenues may sound preposterous," says Stratpoulos. "However, the gradual adoption and/or creation of new platforms built on blockchain technology will make the solution to such accounting problem trivial.”

The study, Monetization of Digital Content: Drivers of Revenue on Q&A Platforms, by Hua Jonathan Ye (University of Oklahoma), Xueping Yang (Zhejiang Gongshang University), Xinwei Wang (University of Auckland), and Theophanis Stratopoulos (University of Waterloo) demonstrates that a revenue sharing model would help platform managers to address the perishability of content problem in a way that is beneficial for both sides.

Campus menorah lighting today; other notes

Today at 4:00 p.m., Rabbi Moshe Goldman, member of UW Chaplains and Director of the The Rohr Chabad Centre for Jewish Life will be hosting the inaugural University of Waterloo campus menorah lighting on the Bomber Patio outside the Student Life Centre to celebrate Hanukkah with students and the broader campus community.

"If by chance you are on campus and available, we would love to have you join the celebrations as well," writes Maryam Latifpoor-Keparoutis of the Faculty of Environment. "Hanukkah is a joyous Jewish holiday which celebrates the miracles in our lives, including our family, community, and our faith in a better tomorrow."

In 2021, Hanukkah began on Sunday night and will end next Monday evening. Today, observers will mark the 5th of Hanukkah's 8-day celebrations. The event will run from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Proof of vaccination will be required to attend the event.

"Career-ing: Figuring It Out" Is a podcast created and run by University of Waterloo students for the purpose of helping other students navigate life at Waterloo," says a note from the Centre for Career Action. "This podcast focuses mainly on the development of academic and professional skills in a casual manner, through interviews with UWaterloo students. We cover topics such as staying organized in class to finding co-ops and developing business skills. We want to amplify voices that the mainstream discourse does not listen to and offer a platform to share unusual work-experiences, shine light on neglected issues and non-linear paths."

"The podcast offers a platform for students to share their story. If you are interested in learning how other Waterloo students developed some of these skills through their experiences as a student, tune in. We have a new 1-on-1 interview being posted on SoundCloud every Monday."