Peace agreements with a gender perspective are still an exception, not the rule

Peace agreements do not represent the totality of a peace process, but they are often critical junctures in transitions from conflict to peace and can shape and set inclusion agendas that endure long after armed conflicts end. Two decades after the UN called on all peace process actors to adopt a gender perspective, but amidst an unpreceded challenge to women’s rights globally under the Covid-19 pandemic, how did peace agreements provide for women, girls and gender in 2020, and what does this tell us about the trajectory of the women, peace and security agenda

Case Studies of the Literacy Interactions of Preschool Deaf Children with their Parents in the Home

In the field of deaf education, a long-standing and still unanswered question is why are the reading levels and academic achievement levels of deaf and hard of hearing children inferior to their hearing peers. Teachers and parents continue to look for reasons to explain the gap and strategies they can use to narrow this gap between the reading achievement of children who are deaf and children who hear. For all children, literacy learning begins at birth. During the early years, children listen to and learn from the language their parents speak to them. The children are affected by the family interactions and experiences of daily life both inside and outside the family. Examination of literacy interactions of deaf children and their parents may provide answers to help us understand the literacy achievement gap deaf children experience. For this research dissertation, my focus was on: (a) How does the communication method of the deaf child affect language learning?; (b) How can the parent-child literacy interactions of deaf children be described?, and (c) How can preschool-age deaf children’s emergent literacy behaviors be described? This naturalistic study looked at the early literacy interactions of preschool deaf children of hearing parents. From an initial group of ten families, three families from an early intervention program were selected. The researcher identified the literacy histories of the deaf children, described the parent-child literacy interactions, and explored emergent literacy behaviors occurring in the home. Data sources included parent questionnaires, parent interviews, literacy logs, and observations of parent-child literacy interactions, including storybook reading. Findings reveal that overall family support, the definitive personality of the parents, and the early diagnosis and amplification of the deaf child defined the difference between the deaf child that excelled as an emergent reader and those who did not. Family support assisted in making each child a successful emergent reader. Parents who made an early decision and commitment to a communication mode, whether manual or oral, allowed their child to progress in areas beyond simple vocabulary. Lastly, the early diagnosis of deafness and early amplification aided the deaf child in emergent literacy achievements

Presence-only for marked point process under preferential sampling

Preferential sampling models have garnered significant attention in recent years. Although the original model was developed for geostatistics, it founds applications in other types of data, such as point processes in the form of presence-only data. While this has been recognized in the Statistics literature, there is value in incorporating ideas from both presence-only and preferential sampling literature. In this paper, we propose a novel model that extends existing ideas to handle a continuous variable collected through opportunistic sampling. To demonstrate the potential of our approach, we apply it to sardine biomass data collected during commercial fishing trips. While the data is intuitively understood, it poses challenges due to two types of preferential sampling: fishing events (presence data) are non-random samples of the region, and fishermen tend to set their nets in areas with a high quality and value of catch (i.e., bigger schools of the target species). We discuss theoretical and practical aspects of the problem, and propose a well-defined probabilistic approach. Our approach employs a data augmentation scheme that predicts the number of unobserved fishing locations and corresponding biomass (in kg). This allows for evaluation of the Poisson Process likelihood without the need for numerical approximations. The results of our case study may serve as an incentive to use data collected during commercial fishing trips for decision-making aimed at benefiting both ecological and economic aspects. The proposed methodology has potential applications in a variety of fields, including ecology and epidemiology, where marked point process model are commonly used.FCT -Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(PTDC/MAT-STA/28243/2017