Infants and Toddlers in State and Federal Budgets: Summary Report From Urban Institute Roundtable

Summarizes March 2009 discussions on strategies to enhance public investment in early childhood such as improving health and nutrition programs, aligning programs and funding streams, addressing multiple needs, helping parents, and integrating advocacy

Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on America's Children

Examines the immediate and long-term impact of worksite immigration raids on children with undocumented parents at three sites, including on their care, housing, economic hardship, and mental health, as well as community response. Makes recommendations

Capital Access for Women: Profile and Analysis of U.S. Best Practice Programs

Examines expert-identified best and promising practices in capital access programs for women among nonprofits, private equity investment groups, and banks. Analyzes factors for success and constraints women entrepreneurs face, and suggests improvements

Stochastic harmonic emission model of aggregate residential customers

Harmonic propagation studies of public distribution networks require accurate models of aggregate residential customers (groups of customers) that simulate the harmonic emission of the multitude of household appliances in the network. Most of the present models were developed with the component-based approach, where models of individual household appliances are combined to build the model of multiple customers. This approach requires high amount of input data, like models of individual household appliances and detail information of customer behavior and device composition, which is usually not easy to acquire. However, with the increasing number of PQ-analyzers in the networks, the measurement-based approach is now more and more considered for the modeling of aggregate customers. The measurement-based approach uses measurements of the network in combination with top-down methodologies to obtain models of the aggregate customers. Compared to the component-based approach it has several advantages, like inherent consideration of the real operating changes of the individual household appliances, variation of customer behavior, effect of line impedances, cancellation and attenuation effects, etc. This thesis presents the development of a time-series stochastic model of the low-order harmonic emission of aggregate residential customers based on a top-down measurement-based approach. The model represents the daily variation of the harmonic magnitudes and phase angles. Besides, the model includes the representation of the harmonic unbalances, which is of great importance for the proper analysis of harmonic propagation in medium-voltage networks. The model is parametrized for German networks, but the methodology can be applied to find the models of other regions or countries

Post-Processing Precise Point Positioning Solutions with Parameter Optimization

Precise Point Positioning (PPP) technique can offer position solutions with centimeter-level accuracy by fusing precise satellite orbits and clocks with un-differenced, dual-frequency, pseudo-range, and carrier-phase observables. PPP presents a compelling alternative to Differential Global Positioning Systems, with the benefit that it only requires a single receiver and does not require simultaneous observations from many stations, making it appealing for ongoing research on hydro-graphic survey applications. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been working on a buoy system tracked with a Global Positioning Systems receiver and Inertial Measurement Unit sensor using the PPP technique. In the interest of obtaining accurate measurements, this data is post-processed using a software package for position navigation with tight Inertial Navigation System capabilities developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, this is GNSS Inferred Positioning Systems (GIPSYx). GIPSYx Software allows finely controllable user inputs for selectable models and configurations. This flexibility allows fitting the right models for different data sources but requires a tuning process to find suitable configurations. A processing strategy for buoy data with GIPSYx positioning software is described and a method to assess solutions to automatically optimize the process of finding these manually tuned model parameters is provided. Other data sources are considered to generalize this method and prove the concept of optimizing positioning software configurations from output solution evaluation using black-box optimization

Becoming-Artwork: Rethinking Agency and Performativity Through the Conservation History of Rembrandt's The Night Watch (1642)

This thesis stems from the mainstream notion that art conservation is a practice that stabilizes objects with well-defined properties, and it argues that idea is complexified when conservation practices are studied attentively. By considering concepts from new materialism – specifically becoming, agency and performativity – this analysis looks closely at the long conservation history of Rembrandt van Rijn’s canonical painting The Night Watch (1642), to center on the ontological tensions between states of change and permanency in which the painting comes to be. With a focus on process and materiality, this thesis begins with a historiographical exploration of the object in conservation theories, ranging from a positivist understanding of the work of art as a single object with defined physical properties, to a more constructivist definition, where the art object is understood as a multiplicity of forces. The text proceeds to introduce The Night Watch as an entity that transits between temporal ontologies of change and permanency, thus destabilizing its identity as a single artwork, positing it, rather, as an entity in transition, a becoming-object. Framing Rembrandt’s painting as process poses the question of who and what agents co-produce this process. Agency is demonstrated to be distributed amongst the artist, the materials of the painting itself, the conservators, and the technologies used in preservation practices: all forces that interact and mobilize one another in the process of materialization of The Night Watch. Accounting for the boundaries of The Night Watch not as fixed, but as being materialized, forces us to account for the practices – repetitions of doings – that perform those boundaries in the first place. The research and conservation project of the painting, Operation Night Watch, currently ongoing at the Rijksmuseum, displays all these agencies at play at the museum’s gallery. Understanding artworks as process ultimately has consequences not only for how an artwork is perceived, as fixed and eternal, but also for conservation ethics

Revisiting Rivera: Palatalization of dental stops in a border town

I present a follow-up study of the social stratification of palatalization of /ti/, /di/ in Uruguayan Portuguese (UP). Carvalho's (1998) provided apparent-time evidence suggesting that palatalization of /ti/, /di/ in Rivera was undergoing linguistic change. I test the apparent-time construct with the objective of substantiating the change in progress hypothesized by Carvalho (1998). The examinations of linguistic factors indicate that following and preceding context and tonicity of the syllable condition the variability. Data results confirmed the hypothesis that younger speakers tend to prefer the innovative variant, however, cross-sectional comparisons point toward a state of relative stability at the speech-community level

Análisis hidrológico basado en teledetección y sistemas de información geográfica para determinación de áreas inundadas en cuencas del área metropolitana de San Salvador

En este trabajo de graduación presenta una propuesta innovadora que modifica el proceso tradicional de análisis hidrológico, permitiendo caracterizar la cuenca a través de la teledetección, la cual hace uso de sensores remotos que identifican como objetos parámetros físicos que se convierten en datos de entrada para el análisis hidrológico de la cuenca. Inicialmente se muestra el concepto de cuenca y los parámetros básicos de caracterización, para después abordar los Sistemas de información Geográfica (SIG) como una herramienta tecnológica que nos permite procesar información de diferentes fuentes de forma rápida y con mayor precisión. También se describe a la teledetección como insumo de datos de los SIGs, sus fundamentos, sus principales sensores y productos. En los capítulos 3 y 4 se describe la metodología a seguir para lograr integrar la búsqueda y procesamiento de datos satelitales, para finalmente poder obtener información hidrológica de la cuenca siguiendo un procedimiento propio de las técnicas de teledetección aplicables a la zona de estudio y teniendo en cuenta la información de libre acceso disponibl

Facing Our Future: Children in the Aftermath of Immigration Enforcement

Based on interviews, examines the effects of the arrest, detention, and/or deportation of undocumented parents on their children, including changes in behavior, food sufficiency, and housing. Explores community responses. Makes policy recommendations