Integrated Cross System Framework: Assessing Needs of Child Welfare Involved Youth and Families

poster abstractNearly half (47.9%) of youth , ages 2 to 14, in the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being who had experienced abuse or neglect had clinically significant behavioral health problems (Burns, et al., 2004). Yet, inconsistent identification of parental risks and unmet treatment needs (Libby, et. al., 2005) and underreporting of mental health problems by foster parents, social workers and providers (Raghavan, Inkelas, Franke & Halfon, 2007) are common in the child welfare system. Possible solutions include integrating policies and practices across child welfare, behavioral health and Medicaid agencies (Bai, Wells & Hillemeier, 2009) including comprehensive assessment of vulnerable youth’s and parents’ needs to help plan appropriate interventions (Kisiel, Fehrenbach, Small & Lyons, 2009). Since 2007, Indiana behavioral health providers have used the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS, Lyons, 2009) assessment. In 2010 child welfare implemented the tool, linking referrals for behavioral health services and placements to ratings for youth and caregivers. Simultaneously, Medicaid services were linked to CANS ratings. The CANS tool includes six dimensions (youth behavioral health symptoms, functioning, risk behaviors and strengths and caregiver strength and needs). The ongoing evaluation of an intensive community based services Medicaid demonstration grant provides a window to view the impact of cross system integration of a common assessment tool and the relationship of substance use and mental health needs of caregivers on youth with behavioral health needs and child welfare involvement. Levels of fidelity to the wraparound services model (Bruns et al., 2010), youth and family satisfaction (Brunk & Innes, 2003), claims service information and outcomes (based on CANS) for 1051 grantees, including 494 youth involved with child protective services, have been collected. Differences between urban and rural settings were examined. Findings. Satisfaction for youth and families and fidelity to the wraparound services models were similar in rural and urban areas. An independent samples T-Test found significant differences for caregiver needs for families with child welfare involvement than for non child welfare involved families. Specifically, higher substance use and developmental needs, less involvement in treatment and residential stability and military transitions were significantly higher (p < .01). Consistent with earlier trends (Effland, Walton & McIntyre, 2011), a hierarchical multiple linear regression model involving 377 CPS involved youth found that higher beginning youth needs [symptoms (anxiety and conduct disorders), functioning issues (school achievement and social functioning) and risk behavior (delinquency)], initial caregiver needs (specifically substance abuse) and high wraparound fidelity (particularly community based and outcome wraparound elements) predict improvement in youth needs. On a youth/family level, using common assessment tools helps service providers and families reach consensus about needs, develop individualized intervention plans and monitor progress. At a macro level, using a common language and assessment information across service systems can improve access to needed services. Such strategies build an integrated framework to provide individualized services for vulnerable youth and families (Burns, et al., 2004)

Genome-Wide Transcription and Functional Analyses Reveal Heterogeneous Molecular Mechanisms Driving Pyrethroids Resistance in the Major Malaria Vector Anopheles funestus Across Africa.

Pyrethroid resistance in malaria vector, An. funestus is increasingly reported across Africa, threatening the sustainability of pyrethroid-based control interventions, including long lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs). Managing this problem requires understanding of the molecular basis of the resistance from different regions of the continent, to establish whether it is being driven by a single or independent selective events. Here, using a genome-wide transcription profiling of pyrethroid resistant populations from southern (Malawi), East (Uganda), and West Africa (Benin), we investigated the molecular basis of resistance, revealing strong differences between the different African regions. The duplicated cytochrome P450 genes (CYP6P9a and CYP6P9b) which were highly overexpressed in southern Africa are not the most upregulated in other regions, where other genes are more overexpressed, including GSTe2 in West (Benin) and CYP9K1 in East (Uganda). The lack of directional selection on both CYP6P9a and CYP6P9b in Uganda in contrast to southern Africa further supports the limited role of these genes outside southern Africa. However, other genes such as the P450 CYP9J11 are commonly overexpressed in all countries across Africa. Here, CYP9J11 is functionally characterized and shown to confer resistance to pyrethroids and moderate cross-resistance to carbamates (bendiocarb). The consistent overexpression of GSTe2 in Benin is coupled with a role of allelic variation at this gene as GAL4-UAS transgenic expression in Drosophila flies showed that the resistant 119F allele is highly efficient in conferring both DDT and permethrin resistance than the L119. The heterogeneity in the molecular basis of resistance and cross-resistance to insecticides in An. funestus populations throughout sub-Saharan African should be taken into account in designing resistance management strategies

The Influence of Sea-Level Rise on Salinity in the Lower St. Johns River and the Associated Physics

The lower St Johns River is a low-gradient coastal river with tidal hydrodynamics that remain active from the Atlantic Ocean through to the upstream end of Lake George (river km 200). Salinity in the lower St Johns River is spatially and temporally variable, whereby the salinity distribution is driven primarily by the combination of ocean processes of tides and storm surges and hydrological processes of watershed runoff. This study examines the probability distributions and modes of behavior of salinity for present-day conditions using data, numerical modeling and eigen-analysis. The hypothesis is that long-term changes (decadal scale) in the ocean processes will cause the probability distributions of salinity to adjust, and therefore there is a quantifiable non-stationarity of salinity in the lower St Johns River (shifts in the probability distribution of salinity, as representative of salinity increase) due to sea-level rise. The numerical modeling is validated against data, then the model is applied to generate synthetic salinity records for the main river stem and tributaries of the lower St. Johns based on present-day conditions. The synthetic salinity records are transformed into probability distribution functions (PDFs) and eigen-functions. The same analysis is performed on synthetic salinity records generated by the model when applied in forecast mode (i.e., sea-level rise). Comparisons of the forecasted PDFs and eigen-functions with those for present-day conditions quantify the non-stationarity (shifts in probability distributions and changes in eigen-structure) of the salinity in the lower St Johns River. The underlying physics of the cause (sea-level rise)-effect (non-stationarity of salinity) relationship are assessed in terms of coastal/river hydrodynamics

Social Beliefs for the Realization of the Speech Acts of Apology and Complaint As Defined in Ciluba, French, and English

Most cross-linguistic studies of speech acts have dealt mainly with two languages, a native language and a second or foreign language. The present study investigates a multilingual situation where the native speakers of Ciluba, French, and English are compared to the trilingual speakers of the three languages in terms of the realization of the speech acts of apologizing and complaining. It considers the social beliefs of the subjects of the four language groups for the realization of the two speech acts. The study is part of a larger study that was designed to discover the norms of the three languages under investigation and to see how people speaking a second and a foreign language, with different levels of fluency in each, can participate in the activity of the speech communities of the two languages without violating their socio-cultural norms, and what impact, if any, their knowledge of these languages has on each of the languages they speak. It was found that for the realization of the speech acts of apologizing and complaining, Ciluba socio-cultural beliefs were different from those of English and French, which are similar. In contrast to French and English, in Ciluba social distance and relative power between the participants play an important role in deciding whether the speech acts can be performed or not. The results also revealed that, despite the difference which exists between Ciluba and the other two languages, i.e., French and English, some subjects from the group of Ciluba monolingual subjects showed some similarities with the groups of French and English monolingual subjects in their responses to some items in the questionnaire. This deviation of some of the native speakers of Ciluba from their social beliefs was hypothesized to be a result of their contact with an urban environment and its mixed culture

Social Beliefs for the Realization of the Speech Acts of Apology and Complaint As Defined in Ciluba, French, and English

Most cross-linguistic studies of speech acts have dealt mainly with two languages, a native language and a second or foreign language. The present study investigates a multilingual situation where the native speakers of Ciluba, French, and English are compared to the trilingual speakers of the three languages in terms of the realization of the speech acts of apologizing and complaining. It considers the social beliefs of the subjects of the four language groups for the realization of the two speech acts. The study is part of a larger study that was designed to discover the norms of the three languages under investigation and to see how people speaking a second and a foreign language, with different levels of fluency in each, can participate in the activity of the speech communities of the two languages without violating their socio-cultural norms, and what impact, if any, their knowledge of these languages has on each of the languages they speak. It was found that for the realization of the speech acts of apologizing and complaining, Ciluba socio-cultural beliefs were different from those of English and French, which are similar. In contrast to French and English, in Ciluba social distance and relative power between the participants play an important role in deciding whether the speech acts can be performed or not. The results also revealed that, despite the difference which exists between Ciluba and the other two languages, i.e., French and English, some subjects from the group of Ciluba monolingual subjects showed some similarities with the groups of French and English monolingual subjects in their responses to some items in the questionnaire. This deviation of some of the native speakers of Ciluba from their social beliefs was hypothesized to be a result of their contact with an urban environment and its mixed culture

On designing large, secure and resilient networked systems

2019 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.Defending large networked systems against rapidly evolving cyber attacks is challenging. This is because of several factors. First, cyber defenders are always fighting an asymmetric warfare: While the attacker needs to find just a single security vulnerability that is unprotected to launch an attack, the defender needs to identify and protect against all possible avenues of attacks to the system. Various types of cost factors, such as, but not limited to, costs related to identifying and installing defenses, costs related to security management, costs related to manpower training and development, costs related to system availability, etc., make this asymmetric warfare even challenging. Second, newer and newer cyber threats are always emerging - the so called zero-day attacks. It is not possible for a cyber defender to defend against an attack for which defenses are yet unknown. In this work, we investigate the problem of designing large and complex networks that are secure and resilient. There are two specific aspects of the problem that we look into. First is the problem of detecting anomalous activities in the network. While this problem has been variously investigated, we address the problem differently. We posit that anomalous activities are the result of mal-actors interacting with non mal-actors, and such anomalous activities are reflected in changes to the topological structure (in a mathematical sense) of the network. We formulate this problem as that of Sybil detection in networks. For our experimentation and hypothesis testing we instantiate the problem as that of Sybil detection in on-line social networks (OSNs). Sybil attacks involve one or more attackers creating and introducing several mal-actors (fake identities in on-line social networks), called Sybils, into a complex network. Depending on the nature of the network system, the goal of the mal-actors can be to unlawfully access data, to forge another user's identity and activity, or to influence and disrupt the normal behavior of the system. The second aspect that we look into is that of building resiliency in a large network that consists of several machines that collectively provide a single service to the outside world. Such networks are particularly vulnerable to Sybil attacks. While our Sybil detection algorithms achieve very high levels of accuracy, they cannot guarantee that all Sybils will be detected. Thus, to protect against such "residual" Sybils (that is, those that remain potentially undetected and continue to attack the network services), we propose a novel Moving Target Defense (MTD) paradigm to build resilient networks. The core idea is that for large enterprise level networks, the survivability of the network's mission is more important than the security of one or more of the servers. We develop protocols to re-locate services from server to server in a random way such that before an attacker has an opportunity to target a specific server and disrupt it’s services, the services will migrate to another non-malicious server. The continuity of the service of the large network is thus sustained. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed protocols using theoretical analysis, simulations, and experimentation. For the Sybil detection problem we use both synthetic and real-world data sets. We evaluate the algorithms for accuracy of Sybil detection. For the moving target defense protocols we implement a proof-of-concept in the context of access control as a service, and run several large scale simulations. The proof-of- concept demonstrates the effectiveness of the MTD paradigm. We evaluate the computation and communication complexity of the protocols as we scale up to larger and larger networks

Evaluation of mass selection for grain yield and estimation of genetic variability in three selected maize (Zea mays L.) populations

Fourteen cycles of mass selection for grain yield in Krug(BSK) maize (Zea mays L.) population were evaluated. Estimates of genetic components of variance were obtained for comparison with those computed from the eighth cycle of half-sib and S(,1) selection conducted in the same population. The CO and the even cycles (C2 to C14), and two sets of testcrosses (Cn x CO and Cn x B73) were evaluated in nine environments to estimate progress from mass selection. Unselected S(,1) lines derived from the original, mass, half-sib, and S(,1) selected populations wer evaluated in four environments to obtain the estimates of genetic variance;Significant, but low (0.50 q/ha), linear response for grain yield was obtained from mass selection for grain yield. Increased yield was associated with delayed silk emergence, increased stalk breakage, increased grain moisture, and greater ear height. Estimates of genetic variability for grain yield indicated a decrease of genetic variance for the S(,1) derived population and no change for mass and half-sib derived populations. For many traits, half-sib and S(,1) derived populations had similar estimates of genetic variance. The mass selected population had increased genetic variability for silk date, ear height, stalk lodging, and grain moisture. Estimates of heritability were relatively high for most traits;Although significant linear response was observed from mass selection, the mean performance of S(,1) progenies derived from the mass selected population were 6.85% lower yielding than S(,1) lines from the original population. Reduced yield for the mass selection derived lines was accompanied by delayed silking, decreased ears per plant, increased ear height, and greater stalk breakage. The S(,1) progenies from half-sib and S(,1) selected populations, however, had increased grain yield, reduced ear height, root lodging, and stalk breakage, and increased ears per plant;Predicted genetic gains computed for each trait in each population indicated that S(,1) selection was superior to mass and half-sib selection methods