790 research outputs found
LGBTQ Youth’s Development in Ontario Schools
Abstract
In order to support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) students, the Ontario government recently introduced a new sex education curriculum that seeks to educate all students about the LGBTQ community. Through a progressive initiative, the rise of social media and information technology have changed the way in which students interact and learn, so it is critical to develop a current understanding of struggles that LGBTQ students face, whether it be with conventional forms of discrimination and bullying, or instances of cyberbullying. It is likewise important to understand how these issues impact their self-perceptions and development. To understand these concerns, the current study employs an extensive literature review, then, through the lens of the anti-oppressive practice (AOP) and theory of change, explores potential solutions and considers the effectiveness of Ontario’s new sex education curriculum. The findings suggest that qualitative, longitudinal, and comparative research will need to be done in the future to determine the nature of the issues that current LGBTQ students face and the effectiveness of proposed solutions
High-Isolation Dual-Polarized Microstrip Antenna via Substrate Integrated Waveguide Technology
A dual-polarized microstrip antenna with high-isolation is proposed by the utilization of the substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) technology. According to the SIW technology, the metalized holes (MHs) are inserted into the substrate for the proposed antenna and the electric fields of the feeding parts are enclosed, so the isolation of the antenna is enhanced. The bandwidth is improved due to the MHs in the four sides of the antenna. A prototype of the proposed antenna has been fabricated and measured. Experimental results indicate that the antenna obtains the isolation more than 40 dB and achieves the impedance bandwidth of 21.9% and 23.8%(11.8-14.6 GHz and 11.65-14.8 GHz for two ports) of the reflection coefficients less than -20 dB. The cross polarization with the main lobe remains less than -30 dB and the half-power beam width is about 70° for the proposed antenna. Meanwhile, the front-to-back ratio remains to be better than 20 dB. A good agreement between the measured and simulated results validates the proposed design
Waiting time distribution of solar energetic particle events modeled with a non-stationary Poisson process
We present a study of the waiting time distributions (WTDs) of solar
energetic particle (SEP) events observed with the spacecraft and .
Both the WTDs of solar electron events (SEEs) and solar proton events (SPEs)
display a power-law tail . The SEEs display a broken
power-law WTD. The power-law index is 0.99 for the short waiting
times (100
hours). The break of the WTD of SEEs is probably due to the modulation of the
corotating interaction regions (CIRs). The power-law index 1.82
is derived for the WTD of SPEs that is consistent with the WTD of type II radio
bursts, indicating a close relationship between the shock wave and the
production of energetic protons. The WTDs of SEP events can be modeled with a
non-stationary Poisson process which was proposed to understand the waiting
time statistics of solar flares (Wheatland 2000; Aschwanden McTiernan
2010). We generalize the method and find that, if the SEP event rate varies as the time distribution of event rate , the time-dependent Poisson distribution
can produce a power-law tail WTD , where .Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letter
Efficient Estimation Under Data Fusion
We aim to make inferences about a smooth, finite-dimensional parameter by
fusing data from multiple sources together. Previous works have studied the
estimation of a variety of parameters in similar data fusion settings,
including in the estimation of the average treatment effect and average reward
under a policy, with the majority of them merging one historical data source
with covariates, actions, and rewards and one data source of the same
covariates. In this work, we consider the general case where one or more data
sources align with each part of the distribution of the target population, for
example, the conditional distribution of the reward given actions and
covariates. We describe potential gains in efficiency that can arise from
fusing these data sources together in a single analysis, which we characterize
by a reduction in the semiparametric efficiency bound. We also provide a
general means to construct estimators that achieve these bounds. In numerical
experiments, we illustrate marked improvements in efficiency from using our
proposed estimators rather than their natural alternatives. Finally, we
illustrate the magnitude of efficiency gains that can be realized in vaccine
immunogenicity studies by fusing data from two HIV vaccine trials
Fractal Metamaterial Absorber with Three-Order Oblique Cross Dipole Slot Structure and its Application for In-band RCS Reduction of Array Antennas
To miniaturize the perfect metamaterial absorber, a fractal three-order oblique cross dipole slot structure is proposed and investigated in this paper. The fractal perfect metamaterial absorber (FPMA) consists of two metallic layers separated by a lossy dielectric substrate. The top layer etched a three-order oblique fractal-shaped cross dipole slot set in a square patch and the bottom one is a solid metal. The parametric study is performed for providing practical design guidelines. A prototype with a thickness of 0.0106λ (λ is the wavelength at 3.18 GHz) of the FPMA was designed, fabricated, measured, and is loaded on a 1×10 guidewave slot array antennas to reduce the in-band radar cross section (RCS) based on their surface current distribution. Experiments are carried out to verify the simulation results, and the experimental results show that the absorption at normal incidence is above 90% from 3.17 to 3.22GHz, the size for the absorber is 0.1λ×0.1λ, the three-order FPMA is miniaturized 60% compared with the zero-order ones, and the array antennas significantly obtain the RCS reduction without the radiation deterioration
MoEController: Instruction-based Arbitrary Image Manipulation with Mixture-of-Expert Controllers
Diffusion-model-based text-guided image generation has recently made
astounding progress, producing fascinating results in open-domain image
manipulation tasks. Few models, however, currently have complete zero-shot
capabilities for both global and local image editing due to the complexity and
diversity of image manipulation tasks. In this work, we propose a method with a
mixture-of-expert (MOE) controllers to align the text-guided capacity of
diffusion models with different kinds of human instructions, enabling our model
to handle various open-domain image manipulation tasks with natural language
instructions. First, we use large language models (ChatGPT) and conditional
image synthesis models (ControlNet) to generate a large number of global image
transfer dataset in addition to the instruction-based local image editing
dataset. Then, using an MOE technique and task-specific adaptation training on
a large-scale dataset, our conditional diffusion model can edit images globally
and locally. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach performs
surprisingly well on various image manipulation tasks when dealing with
open-domain images and arbitrary human instructions. Please refer to our
project page: [https://oppo-mente-lab.github.io/moe_controller/]Comment: 5 pages,6 figure
Defined Benefit Pension Plans: Cost of Living Adjustments and Membership Heterogeneity
In this paper we explore different structures for cost of living adjustments (COLA), based on Hardy et al. (2020)’s five significant criteria: affordability, sustainability, efficiency, adequacy, and fairness. Full COLA protects plan members’ real income after retirement but leads to high costs and solvency risks. A two-tier COLA method, as an alternative, moderates the risks and protects low-paid members’ benefits. We provide a new insight using a heterogeneous pension plan model, consisting of equal populations of blue-collar (lower-paid) and white-collar (higher-paid) members. We further modify the existing benefit structure of the heterogeneous plan to achieve a DB pension plan conforming to the five criteria
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