Meeting the Needs of Central American Migrant Youth in Schools

The goal of this qualitative inquiry was to explore the barriers that Central American migrant youth face in California education settings while using the power of participatory action research to harness the direct voices of this unique and rapidly growing population. The current study examined narratives from 12 former students (ages 17-23) who migrated from Central America and enrolled in U.S. public schools during their adolescence. Participants were recruited by former staff and their peers using social media. Qualitative inquiry about their educational experiences was conducted via semi- structured interviews with the support of peer researchers using a questionnaire focused on themes of students’ educational history, country of origin, age of arrival, socioeconomic status, mental health, and school supports. Interviews were transcribed and coded thematically. Results showed that the developmental timing of migration, country of origin, family history, and reason for immigrating all had an impact on adjustment to school and mental health. Most notably, results indicated that the effects of mental health permeated all themes explored in this study suggesting that behavioral health care and social-emotional support services are an unmet need in this population. The research team has concluded that the diverse needs of this population require comprehensive efforts and supports in the school setting and have direct implications for social work in developing supports, policy, and best practices in direct service to support the complex needs of this population

Investment-Specific Technology Shocks in a Small Open Economy

In this paper we examine the behavioral responses of key macroeconomic variables in Canada to exogenous innovations to investment specific technology. This is done by developing a stylized international real business cycle model which is simulated to explore its ability to shed new light on the dynamic behavior of the standard small open economy. The results indicate that this model can quantitatively replicate the key dynamic features of the post-war Canadian economy, and thus shocks to investment-specific technology can be considered an important propagation mechanism for studying and understanding modern macroeconomic dynamics in small open economies. Moreover, when the model was augmented with an endogenous utilization rate it was able to generate the counter-cyclical behavior of the external accounts - without appealing to an adjustment cost parameter and/or a propagation mechanism whose volatility and persistence are artificially low.Endogenous rate of time preference; Investment-specific shocks; Relative price of investment goods

Exact derivation of a finite-size-scaling law and corrections to scaling in the geometric Galton-Watson process

The theory of finite-size scaling explains how the singular behavior of thermodynamic quantities in the critical point of a phase transition emerges when the size of the system becomes infinite. Usually, this theory is presented in a phenomenological way. Here, we exactly demonstrate the existence of a finite-size scaling law for the Galton-Watson branching processes when the number of offsprings of each individual follows either a geometric distribution or a generalized geometric distribution. We also derive the corrections to scaling and the limits of validity of the finite-size scaling law away the critical point. A mapping between branching processes and random walks allows us to establish that these results also hold for the latter case, for which the order parameter turns out to be the probability of hitting a distant boundary.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure

On the extinction of Continuous State Branching Processes with catastrophes

We consider continuous state branching processes (CSBP) with additional multiplicative jumps modeling dramatic events in a random environment. These jumps are described by a L\'evy process with bounded variation paths. We construct a process of this class as the unique solution of a stochastic differential equation. The quenched branching property of the process allows us to derive quenched and annealed results and to observe new asymptotic behaviors. We characterize the Laplace exponent of the process as the solution of a backward ordinary differential equation and establish the probability of extinction. Restricting our attention to the critical and subcritical cases, we show that four regimes arise for the speed of extinction, as in the case of branching processes in random environment in discrete time and space. The proofs are based on the precise asymptotic behavior of exponential functionals of L\'evy processes. Finally, we apply these results to a cell infection model and determine the mean speed of propagation of the infection

Portable Reading Assistant Headset for the Visually Impaired (PRAHVI)

Most products in the domain of assisting people with visual disabilities interpret text focus on the direct translation or dictation of text that is in front of a user. The focus is seldom on any type of textual understanding that goes beyond literal translation. In this project, we have developed the implementation of a novel wearable system that allows the visually impaired to have a better understanding of the textual world around them. Using the equivalent of a typical smartphone camera, a device captures a feed of the user’s surroundings. Pre-processing algorithms for adjusting white-balance and exposure and detecting blurriness are then employed to optimize the capture. The resulting images are sent to the user’s smartphone to be translated into text. Finally, the text is read aloud using an app that the user can control using touch and haptic feedback. The back-end of this system continuously learns from these captures over time to provide more significant and natural feedback based on a user’s semantic queries regarding the text before them. This document includes the requirements, design, use cases, risk tables, workflow and the architecture for the device we developed

Application of a Fractional Order Integral Resonant Control to increase the achievable bandwidth of a nanopositioner

The congress program will essentially include papers selected on the highest standard by the IPC, according to the IFAC guidelines www.ifac-control.org/publications/Publications-requirements-1.4.pdf, and published in open access in partnership with Elsevier in the IFAC-PapersOnline series, hosted on the ScienceDirect platform www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/24058963. Survey papers overviewing a research topic are also most welcome. Contributed papers will have usual 6 pages length limitation. 12 pages limitation will apply to survey papers.Publisher PD

Chemical reaction systems with toric steady states

Mass-action chemical reaction systems are frequently used in Computational Biology. The corresponding polynomial dynamical systems are often large (consisting of tens or even hundreds of ordinary differential equations) and poorly parametrized (due to noisy measurement data and a small number of data points and repetitions). Therefore, it is often difficult to establish the existence of (positive) steady states or to determine whether more complicated phenomena such as multistationarity exist. If, however, the steady state ideal of the system is a binomial ideal, then we show that these questions can be answered easily. The focus of this work is on systems with this property, and we say that such systems have toric steady states. Our main result gives sufficient conditions for a chemical reaction system to have toric steady states. Furthermore, we analyze the capacity of such a system to exhibit positive steady states and multistationarity. Examples of systems with toric steady states include weakly-reversible zero-deficiency chemical reaction systems. An important application of our work concerns the networks that describe the multisite phosphorylation of a protein by a kinase/phosphatase pair in a sequential and distributive mechanism