Voices from immigrant youth: Perceptions of their involvement with the Canadian justice system. A qualitative study

The development of the thesis project “Voices from Immigrant Youth: Perceptions of their Involvement with the Canadian Justice System. A Qualitative Study” satisfies two purposes. First, it fulfills an academic requirement that I have to meet in order to obtain the Masters of Arts in Community Psychology, and, second, it explores an issue that was identifies as a social concern by members of the Latin American community in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The study explores the issues faced by Latin American immigrant youth in their process of adapting to Canadian society, and highlights their experiences and perceptions regarding their involvement with the Canadian justice system as well as their need for support and services. The study also offers recommendations geared to improve the well-being of immigrant youth. Methodologically, a qualitative method of inquiry guided the study. It focused on obtaining in-depth and detailed information about this social phenomenon that concerned some members and parents of the Latin American community in Kitchener-Waterloo. The participatory-action research approach allowed community members to participate in the study through their involvement with the Community Support Group. This group supported the study by guiding and providing feedback to the research, reaching participants, and validating and checking my perceptions regarding the Latin American community. Data, rich in content, were collected from members of the Community Support Group and in-depth individual interviews with the nine Latin American youth, two parents, and two service providers. Theories such as the phenomenological paradigm of inquiry, the ecological paradigm, and the promotion-prevention-protection continuum were used in the interpretation and analysis of the information. The findings show that for the participants, immigration to Canada and the acculturation process was a highly demanding period in their lives. It brought pressures and challenges for them, in a time in which they were also facing the developmental tasks of adolescence. The findings show that participants and their families were experiencing risk factors associated with socio-economic and environmental circumstances such as poverty, lack of social support networks, lack of awareness of service providers of their needs as immigrants, and discrimination and prejudice. In my perception, the socio-economic conditions plus the family and personal issues with which participants were living generated by the stresses and challenges of the migration process more likely created the conditions for their involvement with the Canadian Justice System. Participants voiced their perception of the Canadian Justice System and the impact that their involvement with the system had on their young lives. The perception of being harassed or discriminated against as well as the lack of information on how the legal system works and the need for information in their own language was also mentioned. A review of the needs for support brought forward the need for support at different levels, not only for immigrant families in general, but specifically for youth already in contact with the Canadian Justice System. From my perspective, the study provides background on an issue that was a concern for some members of the Latin American community in Kitchener-Waterloo, but that may also affect other immigrant youth in the same situation. It confirms what has been reported in other studies regarding the migration process. In my view, the study also offers evidence that socio-economic determinants have a strong effect on how a disadvantaged population, immigrants in this case, access services and make choices. It also shows that in the case of the immigrant youth of the study institutional responses to their needs were not present or were insufficient. Based on the participants’ perceptions, a set of recommendations is also presented

Biomedical and Human Factors Requirements for a Manned Earth Orbiting Station

This report is the result of a study conducted by Republic Aviation Corporation in conjunction with Spacelabs, Inc.,in a team effort in which Republic Aviation Corporation was prime contractor. In order to determine the realistic engineering design requirements associated with the medical and human factors problems of a manned space station, an interdisciplinary team of personnel from the Research and Space Divisions was organized. This team included engineers, physicians, physiologists, psychologists, and physicists. Recognizing that the value of the study is dependent upon medical judgments as well as more quantifiable factors (such as design parameters) a group of highly qualified medical consultants participated in working sessions to determine which medical measurements are required to meet the objectives of the study. In addition, various Life Sciences personnel from NASA (Headquarters, Langley, MSC) participated in monthly review sessions. The organization, team members, consultants, and some of the part-time contributors are shown in Figure 1. This final report embodies contributions from all of these participants

A note on the off-diagonal Muckenhoupt-Wheeden conjecture

We obtain the off-diagonal Muckenhoupt-Wheeden conjecture for Calderón-Zygmund operators. Namely, given $1 < p < q < \infty$ and a pair of weights $(u; v)$, if the Hardy-Littlewood maximal function satisfies the following two weight inequalities: M:L^p(v) \to L^q(u) \quad \mbox{and} \quad M: L^{q'} (u^{1-q'}) \to (v^{1-p'} ); then any Calderón-Zygmund operator $T$ and its associated truncated maximal operator $T_{*}$ are bounded from $M:L^p(v)$ to $L^q(u)$. Additionally, assuming only the second estimate for $M$ then $T$ and $T_{*}$ map continuously $M:L^p(v)$ to $L^{q,\infty}(u)$ We also consider the case of generalized Haar shift operators and show that their off-diagonal two weight estimates are governed by the corresponding estimates for the dyadic Hardy-Littlewood maximal function

Properties of the phi meson at high temperatures and densities

We calculate the spectral density of the phi meson in a hot bath of nucleons and pions using a general formalism relating self-energy to the forward scattering amplitude (FSA). In order to describe the low energy FSA, we use experimental data along with a background term. For the high energy FSA, a Regge parameterization is employed. We verify the resulting FSA using dispersion techniques. We find that the position of the peak of the spectral density is slightly shifted from its vacuum position and that its width is considerably increased. The width of the spectral density at a temperature of 150 MeV and at normal nuclear density is more than 90 MeV.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, Poster presented at Quark Matter 200

Bjerrum pairing correlations at charged interfaces

Electrostatic correlations play a fundamental role in aqueous solutions. In this letter, we identify transverse and lateral correlations as two mutually exclusive regimes. We show that the transverse regime leads to binding by generalization of Bjerrum pair formation theory, yielding binding constants from first-principle statistical-mechanical calculations. We compare our theoretical predictions with experiments on charged membranes and Langmuir monolayers and find good agreement. We contrast our approach with existing theories in the strong-coupling limit and on charged modulated interfaces, and discuss different scenarios that lead to charge reversal and equal-sign attraction by macro-ions.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

A study of factors related to primary grade spelling: correlations of factors studied.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Lepto-mesons, Leptoquarkonium and the QCD Potential

We consider bound states of heavy leptoquark-antiquark pairs (lepto-mesons) as well as leptoquark-antileptoquark pairs (leptoquarkonium). Unlike the situation for top quarks, leptoquarks (if they exist) may live long enough for these hadrons to form. We study the spectra and decay widths of these states in the context of a nonrelativistic potential model which matches the recently calculated two-loop QCD potential at short distances to a successful phenomenological quarkonium potential at intermediate distances. We also compute the expected number of events for these states at future colliders.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables, plain TeX, requires harvmac. References updated and minor clarifications made. To appear in Physics Letters

Depressive Rumination: Investigating Mechanisms to Improve Cognitive Behavioural Treatments

Rumination has been identified as a core process in the development and maintenance of depression. Treatments targeting ruminative processes may, therefore, be particularly helpful for treating chronic and recurrent depression. The development of such treatments requires translational research that marries clinical trials, process–outcome research, and basic experimental research that investigates the mechanisms underpinning pathological rumination. For example, a program of experimental research has demonstrated that there are distinct processing modes during rumination that have distinct functional effects for the consequences of rumination on a range of clinically relevant cognitive and emotional processes: an adaptive style characterized by more concrete, specific processing and a maladaptive style characterized by abstract, overgeneral processing. Based on this experimental work, two new treatments for depression have been developed and evaluated: (a) rumination-focused cognitive therapy, an individual-based face-to-face therapy, which has encouraging results in the treatment of residual depression in an extended case series and a pilot randomized controlled trial; and (b) concreteness training, a facilitated self-help intervention intended to increase specificity of processing in patients with depression, which has beneficial findings in a proof-of-principle study in a dysphoric population. These findings indicate the potential value of process–outcome research (a) explicitly targeting identified vulnerability processes and (b) developing interventions informed by research into basic mechanisms