The Culturally-adapted Early Pathways Program for Young Latino Children in Poverty: A Randomized Controlled Trial

This study used a randomized controlled design with treatment and wait-list conditions to evaluate the efficacy of a culturally adapted version of the Early Pathways program (EP; Fox & Gresl, 2014), an in-home, parent–child therapy program with 137 at-risk Latino children under the age of 6 referred for severe behavior and emotional problems, such as aggression, oppositional behavior, self-injury, and property destruction. EP directly engaged the parent–child dyad, emphasizing parent-directed training, child-led play, psychoeducation, and cognitive–behavioral strategies. Cultural modifications included establishing community partnerships to identify Latino family needs, translation of materials, offering bilingual services, acculturation assessment, and cultural competence training. Multivariate analyses of covariance (MANCOVA) revealed significant differences between the immediate and delayed treatment groups on all posttest measures with the pretest scores as covariates. After the delayed group completed treatment, repeated measures, multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA) showed significant improvement for both groups on all measures with maintenance at 4- to 6-week follow-up. Outcomes included reduced child behavior problems, increased child prosocial behaviors, improved caregiver limit setting, enhanced caregiver nurturing, improved parent–child relationships, and a decrease in clinical diagnoses following treatment. This study highlights the efficacy of using culturally adapted early intervention services for young Latino children in poverty referred for significant behavior and emotional problems

The recovery of microwave scattering parameters from scatterometric measurements with special application to the sea

As part of an effort to demonstrate the value of the microwave scatterometer as a remote sea wind sensor, the interaction between an arbitrarily polarized scatterometer antenna and a noncoherent distributive target was derived and applied to develop a measuring technique to recover all the scattering parameters. The results are helpful for specifying antenna polarization properties for accurate retrieval of the parameters not only for the sea but also for other distributive scenes

Misclassification analysis for the class imbalance problem

In classification, the class imbalance issue normally causes the learning algorithm to be dominated by the majority classes and the features of the minority classes are sometimes ignored. This will indirectly affect how human visualise the data. Therefore, special care is needed to take care of the learning algorithm in order to enhance the accuracy for the minority classes. In this study, the use of misclassification analysis is investigated for data re-distribution. Several under-sampling techniques and hybrid techniques using misclassification analysis are proposed in the paper. The benchmark data sets obtained from the University of California Irvine (UCI) machine learning repository are used to investigate the performance of the proposed techniques. The results show that the proposed hybrid technique presents the best performance in the experiment

Bagging of complementary neural networks with double dynamic weight averaging

Ensemble technique has been widely applied in regression problems. This paper proposes a novel approach of the ensemble of Complementary Neural Network (CMTNN) using double dynamic weight averaging. In order to enhance the diversity in the ensemble, different training datasets created based on bagging technique are applied to an ensemble of pairs of feed-forward back-propagation neural networks created to predict the level of truth and falsity values. In order to obtain more accuracy, uncertainties in the prediction of truth and falsity values are used to weight the prediction results in two steps. In the first step, the weight is used to average the truth and the falsity values whereas the weight in the second step is used to calculate the final regression output. The proposed approach has been tested with benchmarking UCI data sets. The results derived from our technique improve the prediction performance while compared to the traditional ensemble of neural networks which is predicted based on only the truth values. Furthermore, the obtained results from our novel approach outperform the results from the existing ensemble of complementary neural network

On the theory of polarization transfer in inhomogeneous magnetized plasmas

Polarization transfer theory in inhomogeneous magnetized plasmas with mode couplin

Treatment Outcomes for At-Risk Young Children With Behavior Problems: Toward a New Definition of Success

This study examined the outcomes of Early Pathways (EP), an in-home parent–child therapy program with 447 at-risk children younger than 5 years of age who were referred for severe behavior and emotional problems, such as aggression, oppositional behavior, and separation anxiety. EP emphasized parent-directed training of child behavior strategies including psychoeducation regarding child development, child-led play, and cognitive-behavioral techniques. Outcomes were assessed using a unique 2-dimensional definition of treatment completion, which consisted of treatment duration and an assessment of reliable change for the primary outcome measure of child behavior problems. Results showed that the majority of children (63.4%) met or exceeded treatment completion. In addition, repeated-measures multivariate analyses of variance at pretest, posttest, and follow-up revealed increased child prosocial behaviors, reduced child behavior problems, improved caregiver nurturing, an increase in parents’ developmentally appropriate expectations of children, improved parent–child relationships, and a decrease in clinical diagnoses following treatment. This study offers guidance for developing effective early-intervention services for families in poverty to enhance outcomes for their young children. Along with its existing large-scale, community-based effectiveness studies, future research should establish additional statistical support including a randomized, waitlist control design of EP

Structure of the chromosphere-corona transition region

Structure and energy distribution of chromosphere-corona transition regio