The legislative history of the reform bill of 1832

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Determinants for Bullying Victimization among 11–16-Year-Olds in 15 Low- and Middle-Income Countries:\ud A Multi-Level Study

Bullying is an issue of public health importance among adolescents worldwide. The present study aimed at explaining differences in bullying rates among adolescents in 15 low- and middle-income countries using globally comparable indicators of social and economic well-being. Using data derived from the Global School-based Health Survey, we performed bivariate analyses to examine differences in bullying rates by country and by bullying type. We then constructed a multi-level model using four fixed variables (age, gender, hunger and truancy) at the individual level, random effects at the classroom and\ud school levels and four fixed variables at the country level (Gini coefficient, per capita Gross Domestic Project, homicide rate and pupil to teacher ratio). Bullying rates differed significantly by classroom, school and by country, with Egypt (34.2%) and Macedonia (3.6%) having the highest and lowest rates, respectively. Eleven-year-olds were the most likely of the studied age groups to report being bullied, as was being a male. Hunger and truancy were found to significantly predict higher rates of bullying. None of the explanatory variables at the country level remained in the final model. While self-reported bullying varied significantly between countries, the variance between classrooms better explained these differences. Our findings suggest that classroom settings should be considered when designing approaches aimed at bullying prevention.\u

The Impact of Acculturation, Trauma, and Post-Migration Stressors on the Mental Health of African Immigrants and Refugees in Sweden

Mental health promotion is an important public health issue which warrants increased and immediate attention due to the significant impact that mental health can have on physical health,quality of life, and functioning. Immigrants and refugees often have unique and increased mental health needs secondary to their migration to a new country and the acculturative stressors and living difficulties that often accompany resettlement, as well as prior experiences of trauma. However, little to no prior research has been conducted regarding the mental health of African immigrants and refugees living in Sweden. This thesis describes data from a study which was conducted in Stockholm, Sweden from 2002 to 2005 that investigated African immigrant and refugee health and quality of life. Stratified quota sampling based on the 2001 Swedish census was used to recruit a representative sample of participants by gender and country of origin. Four hundred and twenty participants completed semi-structured interviews that utilized cross culturally validated survey instruments to measure depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), acculturation, traumatic events, and post-migration living difficulties. Twenty percent of participants met symptom criteria indicative of depression, and 18.5% met criteria indicative of anxiety. Eighty-ninepercent of participants reported experiencing at least one traumatic event prior to immigration,and 47% met DSM-IV symptomology and functional impairment criteria for PTSD. Mental health outcomes were found to be significantly associated with pre-migration trauma, acculturation level and type, and post-migration stressors. Recommendations for future research, mental health service provision, and integration policies are provided

Social Conceptions of the Corporation: Insights from the History of Shareholder Voting Rights

The diversity of voting rules in today\u27s corporations indicates that power is distributed among shareholders in a great variety of ways, but current theories of the corporation have little to say about this diversity. For insight into the significance of different ways of distributing power among shareholders and the social conceptions of the corporation that they imply, this Article develops a historically-groundedframeworfko r evaluating the political import of shareholder voting rights. Sketching out the history of shareholder voting rights since the early nineteenth century, it shows how the distinctive meaning of the twentieth-century term shareholder democracy grew out of the vertical power relations that had come to characterize American corporations by mid-century. To recalibrate our understanding of horizontal power relations, this Article explores a handful of controversies over voting rules in the nineteenth century. Finally, it applies this more nuanced understanding to present-day voting rules and suggests that competing social conceptions of the corporation are as alive as they were in the nineteenth century.

Scalable Tensor Factorizations for Incomplete Data

The problem of incomplete data - i.e., data with missing or unknown values - in multi-way arrays is ubiquitous in biomedical signal processing, network traffic analysis, bibliometrics, social network analysis, chemometrics, computer vision, communication networks, etc. We consider the problem of how to factorize data sets with missing values with the goal of capturing the underlying latent structure of the data and possibly reconstructing missing values (i.e., tensor completion). We focus on one of the most well-known tensor factorizations that captures multi-linear structure, CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP). In the presence of missing data, CP can be formulated as a weighted least squares problem that models only the known entries. We develop an algorithm called CP-WOPT (CP Weighted OPTimization) that uses a first-order optimization approach to solve the weighted least squares problem. Based on extensive numerical experiments, our algorithm is shown to successfully factorize tensors with noise and up to 99% missing data. A unique aspect of our approach is that it scales to sparse large-scale data, e.g., 1000 x 1000 x 1000 with five million known entries (0.5% dense). We further demonstrate the usefulness of CP-WOPT on two real-world applications: a novel EEG (electroencephalogram) application where missing data is frequently encountered due to disconnections of electrodes and the problem of modeling computer network traffic where data may be absent due to the expense of the data collection process

Demographic and contextual infl uences in injury risk among adolescents in a low-income country setting: Results from a school-based survey in Tanzania

Objective: This study investigated the social, demographic and contextual factors associated with injury among adolescents in a low-income urban sub-Saharan African setting.Methods: Data on 2 176 adolescents aged 11–16 years were divided into three groups: Those that reported not being injured, those that had been injured once, and those that had been injured multiple times within a 12-month recall period. We conducted bivariate analyses to screen for associations with several social, demographic and contextual factors. Then a multinomial logistic regression was performed to examine associations while adjusting for covariates.Results: Within the recall period, 22.14% of participants reported one serious injury and 10.96% reported multiple injuries. Compared with non-injured participants, those injured two or more times were mainly male (relative risk ratio (RRR) = 1.71 [1.27–2.31]), younger (RRR = 0.77 [0.68–0.86]), depressed (RRR = 1.98 [1.43–2.74]) and had high rates of truancy (RRR = 2.56; CI = 1.71–3.84). A travel time of more than 30 minutes to and from school was also associated with increased rates of injury (RRR = 1.61; CI = 1.13–2.29).Conclusions: Injuries are an important source of morbidity among school-attending adolescents in Dar es Salaam. The findings support more research into the contextual factors that predispose adolescents to excessive injury in the region. School settings have the potential to provide safety education in the region.Keywords: injury, sub-Saharan Africa, urban setting, school healt

Analyzing the Performance Portability of Tensor Decomposition

We employ pressure point analysis and roofline modeling to identify performance bottlenecks and determine an upper bound on the performance of the Canonical Polyadic Alternating Poisson Regression Multiplicative Update (CP-APR MU) algorithm in the SparTen software library. Our analyses reveal that a particular matrix computation, $\Phi^{(n)}$, is the critical performance bottleneck in the SparTen CP-APR MU implementation. Moreover, we find that atomic operations are not a critical bottleneck while higher cache reuse can provide a non-trivial performance improvement. We also utilize grid search on the Kokkos library parallel policy parameters to achieve 2.25x average speedup over the SparTen default for $\Phi^{(n)}$ computation on CPU and 1.70x on GPU. We conclude our investigations by comparing Kokkos implementations of the STREAM benchmark and the matricized tensor times Khatri-Rao product (MTTKRP) benchmark from the Parallel Sparse Tensor Algorithm (PASTA) benchmark suite to implementations using vendor libraries. We show that with a single implementation Kokkos achieves performance comparable to hand-tuned code for fundamental operations that make up tensor decomposition kernels on a wide range of CPU and GPU systems. Overall, we conclude that Kokkos demonstrates good performance portability for simple data-intensive operations but requires tuning for algorithms with more complex dependencies and data access patterns.Comment: 28 pages, 19 figure

Suicidal ideation among school-attending adolescents in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

 Background: Suicidal ideation is an understudied risk factor for suicidal intent. The present study investigates the patterns and risk factors for suicidal ideation among a sample of school-attending adolescents in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Methods: This study examined secondary data collected in 2006 through the Global School-Based Student Health Survey. The data were collected via two-stage cluster sampling representative of all secondary schools in Dar es Salaam. We compared adolescents who reported suicidal ideation (SI) and those who reported a plan to carry out a suicide attempt (SP), with those reporting neither ideation nor an attempt (controls) within the 12 months preceding the survey. Our analyses targeted demographic, behavioral, social, mental health and family factors. Results: A total of 2,176 students aged 11-16 years participated. Within the recall period, 7% (n=149) of participants had thought about suicide with 6.3% (n=136) having created a plan to carry out an attempt. Fifty percent of those reporting SP were female. We found that significant associations existed across all categories of psychological health, substance use and among those who reported being bullied. In the multivariate analysis adolescents reporting suicidal intent were more than twice as likely to report having been lonely (RRR=2.33; CI=1.36-4.01); more likely to suffer from depressive symptoms (RRR=2.26; CI=1.56-3.27) and have previously used an illicit substance (RRR=1.97; CI=1.12-3.48). We found an inverse association with age and suicidal planning (RRR=0.74; CI=0.62-0.90) as well as poverty and SP (RRR=0.53; CI=0.29-0.98) and an increased likelihood for adolescents reporting SP to be lonely (RRR=2.76; CI=1.55-4.90) and depressed (RRR=3.98; CI=2.71-5.86). Tobacco use (RRR=2.15; CI=1.22-3.78) and illicit substance use (RRR=1.99; CI=1.10-3.60) were associated with SP as was having parents who were knowledgeable of what adolescents did during their free time (RRR=2.15; CI=1.07-4.31). Respondents who reported having no friends were also more likely to report SP (RRR=3.68; CI=2.22-6.08). Conclusion: Our results suggest that, as in high-income settings, psychological factors, risky health behaviors such as substance use, and social and familial support impact suicidal ideation. This knowledge should be used to help inform further research as well as prevention and intervention strategies.