Parent-child relationships and dyadic friendship experiences as predictors of behavior problems in early adolescence

This study focused on support and conflict in parent–child relationships and dyadic friendships as predictors of behavior problems in early adolescence (n¼182; M age¼12.9 years, 51% female, 45% African American, 74% two-parent homes). Support and conflict in one relationship context were hypothesized to moderate the effects of experiences in the other relationship context. Adolescent-reported antisocial behavior was low when either parent–child relationships or friendships were low in conflict, and adolescent-reported depressed mood was low when either friendship conflict was low or parental support was high. Parent-reported antisocial behavior was high when high levels of conflict were reported in either parent–child or friendship relationships and adolescent-reported depressed mood was high when either parental or friendship support was low. Associations appear to be similar for boys and girls as no interactions involving gender were significant.

An Architectural Approach to Ensuring Consistency in Hierarchical Execution

Hierarchical task decomposition is a method used in many agent systems to organize agent knowledge. This work shows how the combination of a hierarchy and persistent assertions of knowledge can lead to difficulty in maintaining logical consistency in asserted knowledge. We explore the problematic consequences of persistent assumptions in the reasoning process and introduce novel potential solutions. Having implemented one of the possible solutions, Dynamic Hierarchical Justification, its effectiveness is demonstrated with an empirical analysis

The price of empire: Anglo-French rivalry for the Great Lakes fur trades, 1700-1760

As the English and French grappled for North American hegemony in the first half of the eighteenth century, trade with the Indian groups of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley transcended mere financial calculations and assumed a broader imperial significance. to the native peoples who exchanged their peltry for European manufactured goods, trade was the material manifestation of mutual obligation, political dialogue, and military alliance. If the contest for empire inevitably became a battle for the hearts and minds of potential Indian allies, the spoils of victory were most visibly reckoned in furs and skins.;Yet, despite the outspoken criticism of William J. Eccles, historians of Anglo-French trade rivalry continue to embrace the dubious claims of Cadwallader Colden and other eighteenth-century American imperialists that Canadian traders could not compete on level economic ground with their New York and Pennsylvania counterparts. Allegedly beset with shoddy and costly French goods, a jealous monopoly company that greedily fixed the price of furs and skins, and the levies and restrictions of a militaristic state, Canadians were deemed unable to match the success of their Anglo-American competitors, who conversely reaped the benefits of cheap and superior trade merchandise in a commerce largely free of meddling monopolists and obtrusive officials.;A rigorous cross-border comparison of trade-good costs, transportation charges, and peltry prices deflates this hoary myth of Anglo-American economic superiority. With few exceptions, French-Canadian fur traders supplied goods of equal or better quality at rates of exchange competitive with their New York and Pennsylvania rivals. Purely economic considerations, however, never determined success in the trade. as frustrated Anglo-American officials readily admitted, the cohesive and scrupulously-managed French-Canadian trade network proved aptly suited to winning and maintaining Indian friendship and alliance, while unregulated and unscrupulous American traders perennially poisoned Anglo-Indian relations. The persistence of characteristically Canadian commercial practices and Indian trade loyalties despite the 1760 conquest of New France is, perhaps, the most compelling measure of French-Canadian preeminence in the eighteenth-century contest for North American trade and empire

The Magellan Adaptive Secondary VisAO Camera: Diffraction- Limited Broadband Visible Imaging and 20mas Fiber Array IFS

The Magellan Adaptive Secondary AO system, scheduled for first light in the fall of 2011, will be able to simultaneously perform diffraction limited AO science in both the mid-IR, using the BLINC/MIRAC4 10\{mu}m camera, and in the visible using our novel VisAO camera. The VisAO camera will be able to operate as either an imager, using a CCD47 with 8.5 mas pixels, or as an IFS, using a custom fiber array at the focal plane with 20 mas elements in its highest resolution mode. In imaging mode, the VisAO camera will have a full suite of filters, coronagraphic focal plane occulting spots, and SDI prism/filters. The imaging mode should provide ~20% mean Strehl diffraction-limited images over the band 0.5-1.0 \{mu}m. In IFS mode, the VisAO instrument will provide R~1,800 spectra over the band 0.6-1.05 \{mu}m. Our unprecedented 20 mas spatially resolved visible spectra would be the highest spatial resolution achieved to date, either from the ground or in space. We also present lab results from our recently fabricated advanced triplet Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector (ADC) and the design of our novel wide-field acquisition and active optics lens. The advanced ADC is designed to perform 58% better than conventional doublet ADCs and is one of the enabling technologies that will allow us to achieve broadband (0.5-1.0\{mu}m) diffraction limited imaging and wavefront sensing in the visible.Comment: Proceedings of the SPIE, 2010, Vol. 7736, 77362

Fresh-Register Automata

What is a basic automata-theoretic model of computation with names and fresh-name generation? We introduce Fresh-Register Automata (FRA), a new class of automata which operate on an infinite alphabet of names and use a finite number of registers to store fresh names, and to compare incoming names with previously stored ones. These finite machines extend Kaminski and Francez’s Finite-Memory Automata by being able to recognise globally fresh inputs, that is, names fresh in the whole current run. We exam-ine the expressivity of FRA’s both from the aspect of accepted languages and of bisimulation equivalence. We establish primary properties and connections between automata of this kind, and an-swer key decidability questions. As a demonstrating example, we express the theory of the pi-calculus in FRA’s and characterise bisimulation equivalence by an appropriate, and decidable in the finitary case, notion in these automata