Caring and being cared -for: Perceptions of adolescent males at -risk for school failure

This qualitative study used grounded theory methods and purposeful sampling to explore perceptions on caring and being cared-for. Twenty-four adolescent male participants, identified as at-risk for school failure, completed a two phase interview process exploring these phenomena within three relationships; the relationship with the friend, with the most caring person they knew and with the teacher they felt cared for them. ^ Each participant was asked a predetermined set of open questions in an initial semi-structured interview. In addition each participant was encouraged to explore his own reflections on caring. A second interview allowed for member checking and for the participant to continue sharing his meaning of caring and being cared-for. ^ Line by line analysis with open, axial and selective coding was applied to interview transcripts along with a constant comparative method. Results indicated that the core category integrating all other categories was attachment bonding. Participants' stories manifested characteristics of proximity seeking, secure base, safe haven and distress upon involuntary separation from an attachment figure. ^ Strategies facilitating attachment bonding were influenced by the power positions of the relational players. Participants responded positively to the one-caring when they felt cared-for. Results further indicated that participants did not need to feel a sense of belonging in order to feel cared-for. Teacher behaviors indicating openness for authentic connections with students were specific to teacher's friendliness and professional competence. Teachers who nurtured feelings of being cared-for were uncommon in the participants' educational experience. ^ The number of adolescent males leaving high school prematurely is both a personal problem and a social problem. Despite a “mask” of indifference often exhibited by adolescent males at-risk for school failure, teachers might consider the social/emotional needs of these students when implementing the curriculum. In addition, policy makers might consider the social/emotional needs of this vulnerable population when developing programs meant to foster psychological well-being and connectedness for adolescent males at-risk for school failure. ^

A deontic analysis of inter -organizational control requirements

This research focuses on the design and verification of inter-organizational controls. Instead of looking at a documentary procedure, which is the flow of documents and data among the parties, the research examines the underlying deontic purpose of the procedure, the so-called deontic process, and identifies control requirements to secure this purpose. The vision of the research is a formal theory for streamlining bureaucracy in business and government procedures. ^ Underpinning most inter-organizational procedures are deontic relations, which are about rights and obligations of the parties. When all parties trust each other, they are willing to fulfill their obligations and honor the counter parties’ rights; thus controls may not be needed. The challenge is in cases where trust may not be assumed. In these cases, the parties need to rely on explicit controls to reduce their exposure to the risk of opportunism. However, at present there is no analytic approach or technique to determine which controls are needed for a given contracting or governance situation. ^ The research proposes a formal method for deriving inter-organizational control requirements based on static analysis of deontic relations and dynamic analysis of deontic changes. The formal method will take a deontic process model of an inter-organizational transaction and certain domain knowledge as inputs to automatically generate control requirements that a documentary procedure needs to satisfy in order to limit fraud potentials. The deliverables of the research include a formal representation namely Deontic Petri Nets that combine multiple modal logics and Petri nets for modeling deontic processes, a set of control principles that represent an initial formal theory on the relationships between deontic processes and documentary procedures, and a working prototype that uses model checking technique to identify fraud potentials in a deontic process and generate control requirements to limit them. Fourteen scenarios of two well-known international payment procedures—cash in advance and documentary credit—have been used to test the prototype. The results showed that all control requirements stipulated in these procedures could be derived automatically.^

The Political Economy of Financially Successful Independent Hip-Hop Artists

From 2000 to 2010, America’s music industry’s annual revenue went from $4 billion to $2 billion. Much of this is attributed to the internet’s ability to provide consumers with easy access to free music, and hip hop has been especially impacted by this trend. Utilizing document analysis and personal interviews, this study found that the success of independent artists has influenced the business strategies of major record companies. In response to a dramatic decrease in record sales, major labels have made more of an effort to sign their artists to 360 deals, which allow the labels to profit from every aspect of an artist’s brand or identity. While some independent artists are the main beneficiary of the profits generated from their music and personal brand, they also reify the commodity-form capitalist system by attempting to turn their music and brand into a fetishized commodity and by turning their audience into a fetishized commodity.

An Assessment of the Performances of Several Univariate Tests of Normality

The importance of checking the normality assumption in most statistical procedures especially parametric tests cannot be over emphasized as the validity of the inferences drawn from such procedures usually depend on the validity of this assumption. Numerous methods have been proposed by different authors over the years, some popular and frequently used, others, not so much. This study addresses the performance of eighteen of the available tests for different sample sizes, significance levels, and for a number of symmetric and asymmetric distributions by conducting a Monte-Carlo simulation. The results showed that considerable power is not achieved for symmetric distributions when sample size is less than one hundred and for such distributions, the kurtosis test is most powerful provided the distribution is leptokurtic or platykurtic. The Shapiro-Wilk test remains the most powerful test for asymmetric distributions. We conclude that different tests are suitable under different characteristics of alternative distributions.

A Deontic Analysis of Inter-Organizational Control Requirements

This research focuses on the design and verification of inter-organizational controls. Instead of looking at a documentary procedure, which is the flow of documents and data among the parties, the research examines the underlying deontic purpose of the procedure, the so-called deontic process, and identifies control requirements to secure this purpose. The vision of the research is a formal theory for streamlining bureaucracy in business and government procedures. Underpinning most inter-organizational procedures are deontic relations, which are about rights and obligations of the parties. When all parties trust each other, they are willing to fulfill their obligations and honor the counter parties’ rights; thus controls may not be needed. The challenge is in cases where trust may not be assumed. In these cases, the parties need to rely on explicit controls to reduce their exposure to the risk of opportunism. However, at present there is no analytic approach or technique to determine which controls are needed for a given contracting or governance situation. The research proposes a formal method for deriving inter-organizational control requirements based on static analysis of deontic relations and dynamic analysis of deontic changes. The formal method will take a deontic process model of an inter-organizational transaction and certain domain knowledge as inputs to automatically generate control requirements that a documentary procedure needs to satisfy in order to limit fraud potentials. The deliverables of the research include a formal representation namely Deontic Petri Nets that combine multiple modal logics and Petri nets for modeling deontic processes, a set of control principles that represent an initial formal theory on the relationships between deontic processes and documentary procedures, and a working prototype that uses model checking technique to identify fraud potentials in a deontic process and generate control requirements to limit them. Fourteen scenarios of two well-known international payment procedures -- cash in advance and documentary credit -- have been used to test the prototype. The results showed that all control requirements stipulated in these procedures could be derived automatically.

Students' recollections of participating in a first year residential learning community experience

The purpose of this qualitative study was to gain an understanding of what participation in a first year residential learning community meant to students 2-3 years after their involvement in the program. Various theories including environmental, student involvement, psychosocial and intellectual, were used as a framework for this case study. Each of the ten participants was a junior or senior level student at the time of the study, but had previously participated in a first year residential learning community at Florida International University. The researcher held two semi-structured interviews with each participant, and collected data sheets from each. The narrative data produced from the interviews were transcribed, coded and analyzed to gain insights into the experiences and perspectives of the participants. Member checking was used after the interview process. A peer reviewer offered feedback during the data analysis. The resulting data was coded into categories, with a final selection of four themes and 15 sub-themes, which captured the essence of the participants' experiences. The four major themes included: (a) community, (b) involvement, (c) identity, and (d) academics. The community theme is used to describe how students perceived the environment to be. The involvement theme is used to describe the students' participation in campus life and their interaction with other members of the university community. The identity theme is used to describe the students' process of development, and the personal growth they underwent as a result of their experiences. The academics theme refers to the intellectual development of students and their interaction around academic issues. The results of this study showed that the participants valued greatly their involvement in the First Year Residents Succeeding Together program (FYRST) and can articulate how it helped them succeed as students. In describing their experience, they most recall the sense of community that existed, the personal growth they experienced, the academic development process they went through, and their involvement, both with other people and with activities in their community. Recommendations are provided for practice and research, including several related to enhancing the academic culture, integrating faculty, utilizing peer influence and providing further opportunities to create a seamless learning environment.

Formal verification and testing of software architectural models

Ensuring the correctness of software has been the major motivation in software research, constituting a Grand Challenge. Due to its impact in the final implementation, one critical aspect of software is its architectural design. By guaranteeing a correct architectural design, major and costly flaws can be caught early on in the development cycle. Software architecture design has received a lot of attention in the past years, with several methods, techniques and tools developed. However, there is still more to be done, such as providing adequate formal analysis of software architectures. On these regards, a framework to ensure system dependability from design to implementation has been developed at FIU (Florida International University). This framework is based on SAM (Software Architecture Model), an ADL (Architecture Description Language), that allows hierarchical compositions of components and connectors, defines an architectural modeling language for the behavior of components and connectors, and provides a specification language for the behavioral properties. The behavioral model of a SAM model is expressed in the form of Petri nets and the properties in first order linear temporal logic. This dissertation presents a formal verification and testing approach to guarantee the correctness of Software Architectures. The Software Architectures studied are expressed in SAM. For the formal verification approach, the technique applied was model checking and the model checker of choice was Spin. As part of the approach, a SAM model is formally translated to a model in the input language of Spin and verified for its correctness with respect to temporal properties. In terms of testing, a testing approach for SAM architectures was defined which includes the evaluation of test cases based on Petri net testing theory to be used in the testing process at the design level. Additionally, the information at the design level is used to derive test cases for the implementation level. Finally, a modeling and analysis tool (SAM tool) was implemented to help support the design and analysis of SAM models. The results show the applicability of the approach to testing and verification of SAM models with the aid of the SAM tool.

Termos de troca, preço das commodities e o crescimento brasileiro : uma análise sob o prisma da restrição externa

This study aims to investigate the relationship between terms of trade and the long-term growth of Brazilian economy, from the perspective of external constraint, between the period 1994 to 2014. For this purpose, it is based on Thirlwall's (1979) original contribution, in order to empirically test the terms of trade contribution for determining the Brazilian growth potential product equivalent with Balance of Payments equilibriun. Using cointegration method, which seeks to analyze the long-term relationship between the variables, and subdividing the period into two sub-periods, 1994-2004 and 2004-2014, we estimate and compare real and hypothetical income elasticities and predicted and observed growth rates, with and without the terms of trade, for each period. The obteined results show that the inclusion of terms of trade in the empirical procedure to test the validity of Thirlwall's Law lead to higher growth rates obtained by the model (hypothetical), for the entire period 1994-2014 and for the sub-period 2004 -2014. This "theoretical" relaxation of the external constraint, caused by the inclusion of the terms of trade in traditional Thirlwall's rule, overestimated the average real growth rate for these periods, while the traditional Thirlwall's Law - without terms of trade - has adapted better to the real behavior of Brazilian economy. Thus, despite having contributed potentially for the relaxation of external constraint on Brazilian growth, the effect of terms of trade may have been offset by the negative performance of other Balance of Payments components, as capital flows and interest, profits and dividends payments abroad.

Statistical Anomalies of Bitflips in SRAMs to Discriminate SBUs from MCUs

Recently, the occurrence of multiple events in static tests has been investigated by checking the statistical distribution of the difference between the addresses of the words containing bitflips. That method has been successfully applied to Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and the original authors indicate that it is also valid for SRAMs. This paper presents a modified methodology that is based on checking the XORed addresses with bitflips, rather than on the difference. Irradiation tests on CMOS 130 & 90 nm SRAMs with 14-MeV neutrons have been performed to validate this methodology. Results in high-altitude environments are also presented and cross-checked with theoretical predictions. In addition, this methodology has also been used to detect modifications in the organization of said memories. Theoretical predictions have been validated with actual data provided by the manufacturer.

Restrição externa, dependência estrutural de commodities primárias e o investimento direto externo no Brasil

As the beginning of the discussion about the reprimarization process of the Brazilian exportations, or about a deindustrialization process of the country foreign sales, this study purpose that the discussion, actually, should be about the existence of the commodities structural dependence as a way to face the foreign restrictions. Therefore the intention is to show that, historically, the way that the Brazilian economy has crossed for its development depends of the foreign capital, mainly in its way of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and in the balance generated by the primary products, which make us try to understand the impact of this capital for the equilibrium of the Brazilian Payment Balance and also for the economy. These points were discussed not only based on the Brazilian classic writers as Francisco Oliveira, Caio Prado Jr. and Celso Furtado, but also using the newest studies which contributes to point the causes and consequences of the external capital dependence in the actual scenario. The conclusions acquired in the end of the study, indicates the fact that the Brazilian specialization in products of low aggregated value is not recent. Brazil is, historically, a competitive country in primary products. At the same time, the country importation always was a pressure factor of the National Payments Balance, being composed by products with more aggregated value. According to some authors, this characteristic of the Brazilian Economy will be surpassed with the economic opening process, which will attract external capital making possible the modernization of the Brazilian productive sector. Therefore, we can claim that the FDI, in the way it has been inserted in the country, does not offer the opportunity to get out of the commodities dependence, as generators of the payment balances, because the country international competitive standard didn t get any important changes, keeping itself out of the step related to the global standard which has been intensified in products with more aggregated value. The changes in the national insertion standard directed to more technological products is really important to surpass the historical scenario of commodities dependence, making the country less vulnerable to external crisis.

Mary Anne Krupsak opening a checking account at the Women's bank

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Stationary Engineer checking air conditioning gauges

Inscriptions: Verso: [stamped] Photograph by Freda Leinwand. [463 West Street, Studio 229G, New York, NY 10014].

Nurse checking patient's monitors in the intensive care unit at Douglas County hospital in Alexandria, Minnesota

Inscriptions: Verso: [stamped] Photograph by Freda Leinwand. [463 West Street, Studio 229G, New York, NY 10014].

Nurse checking patient's monitors in the intensive care unit at Douglas County hospital in Alexandria, Minnesota

Inscriptions: Verso: [stamped] Credit must be given to Leinwand from Monkmeyer Press Photo Service].

Connectionist-based rules describing the pass-through of individual goods prices into trend inflation in the United States

This paper demonstrates a mechanism whereby rules can be extracted from a feedforward neural network trained to characterize the inflation "pass-through" problem in American monetary policy, defined as the relationship between changes in the growth rate(s) of individual commodities and the economy-wide rate of growth of consumer prices. Monthly price data are encoded and used to train a group of candidate connectionist architectures. One candidate is selected for rule extraction, using a custom decompositional extraction algorithm that generates rules in human-readable and machine-executable form. Rule and network accuracy are compared, and comments are made on the relationships expressed within the discovered rules. The types of discovered relationships could be used to guide monetary policy decisions.