A restorative justice alternative to crime prevention termed reintegrative shaming theory by Braithwaite has seen increased attention as an alternative to retributive justice, although empirical investigations of its efficacy are limited. The purpose of the present study was to test confirmatory measurement and structural models of reintegrative shaming theory in order to assess the underlying theoretical model and the application of this theory in response to drunk driving offenses. Nine latent constructs were included in these models: reintegration, stigmatization, perceived fairness, self esteem, shame-guilt, embarrassment-exposure, unresolved shame, offender responsibility, and family support. Multigroup structural equation modeling was used to assess for measurement invariance of indicators used to measure these nine latent constructs between 724 drunk driving offenders randomly assigned to traditional court processing versus offenders assigned to reintegrative shaming conferencing following arrest. Partial metric and partial scalar invariance were found. Thus, analyses proceeded by conducting tests for significant differences in the latent means between groups. Offenders assigned to conferencing reported significantly higher mean values on the constructs reintegration, perceived fairness, self-esteem, shame-guilt, and family support, supporting Braithwaite's theory. Finally, a structural model was hypothesized based upon Braithwaite's theory to assess the relationships between the latent constructs. Three additional structural paths were included to achieve an acceptable model fit. This structural model was found to be partially invariant between groups. As predicted, a higher level of reintegration was associated with greater perceived fairness, while a higher level of stigmatization was related to decreased self-esteem and lower perceived fairness. In turn, greater self-esteem and perceived fairness were significantly related to higher reported experiences of shame-guilt and lower ratings of embarrassment exposure. Greater perceived fairness also corresponded to lower reported unresolved shame. Finally, greater shame-guilt was significantly related to greater offender responsibility and family support, while unresolved shame was significantly related to less offender responsibility acceptance. The findings from the current study support Braithwaite's hypotheses regarding the importance and benefits of disapproving of the criminal act and not the person, while allowing offenders to accept responsibility for their actions and attempt to remediate the wrong that they committed.

abstract: Disentangling latent spaces is an important research direction in the interpretability of unsupervised machine learning. Several recent works using deep learning are very effective at producing disentangled representations. However, in the unsupervised setting, there is no way to pre-specify which part of the latent space captures specific factors of variations. While this is generally a hard problem because of the non-existence of analytical expressions to capture these variations, there are certain factors like geometric transforms that can be expressed analytically. Furthermore, in existing frameworks, the disentangled values are also not interpretable. The focus of this work is to disentangle these geometric factors of variations (which turn out to be nuisance factors for many applications) from the semantic content of the signal in an interpretable manner which in turn makes the features more discriminative. Experiments are designed to show the modularity of the approach with other disentangling strategies as well as on multiple one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) datasets, clearly indicating the efficacy of the proposed approach. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Electrical Engineering 2019

This thesis describes an approach for object recognition using the chordiogram shape-based descriptor. Global shape representations are highly susceptible to clutter generated due to the background or other irrelevant objects in real-world images. To overcome the problem, we aim to extract precise object shape using superpixel segmentation, perceptual grouping, and connected components. The employed shape descriptor chordiogram is based on geometric relationships of chords generated from the pairs of boundary points of an object. The chordiogram descriptor applies holistic properties of the shape and also proven suitable for object detection and digit recognition mechanisms. Additionally, it is translation invariant and robust to shape deformations. In spite of such excellent properties, chordiogram is not scale-invariant. To this end, we propose scale invariant chordiogram descriptors and intend to achieve a similar performance before and after applying scale invariance. Our experiments show that we achieve similar performance with and without scale invariance for silhouettes and real world object images. We also show experiments at different scales to confirm that we obtain scale invariance for chordiogram.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Importance: Despite its widespread use in clinical settings and in behavioral medicine research, little is known about the psychometric performance of the PHQ-9 across major U.S. sociodemographic groups. Thus, utilizing a large sample representative of the U.S. population and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), we determine the factor structure and measurement invariance of the PHQ-9 across groups based on sex, race/ethnicity, and education level. Objective: Our objective was to address key knowledge gaps by definitively determining the factor structure and measurement invariance of the PHQ-9 across major U.S. sociodemographic groups based on sex, race/ethnicity, and education level. Design: The continuous National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) is a cross-sectional, epidemiologic study designed to assess the health and nutritional status of the U.S. population. We examined data from the 2005-2014 survey years. Setting: NHANES is uses a stratified multistage probability sampling approach to enroll civilian, non-institutionalized adults and children in the U.S. Participants: For our final sample, we selected the 26,202 adult respondents with no missing PHQ-9 data. The factors of interest were sex (49.3% men, 50.7% women), race/ethnicity (48.9% non-Hispanic White, 23.7% non-Hispanic Black, 17.8% Mexican American, 9.7% other Hispanic), and education level (9.9% less than 9th grade, 16.6% 9th-12th grade but no diploma, vii 23.7% high school graduate/GED or equivalent, 28.9% some college or Associate’s degree, 20/8% college graduate or above). Main Outcome(s) and Measure(s): The Patient Health Quessionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) Results: Results revealed that the best solution for the PHQ-9 consists of a cognitive/affective factor (items 1. anhedonia, 2. depressed mood, 6. feelings of worthlessness, 7. concentration difficulties, 8. psychomotor disturbances, and 9. thoughts of death) and a somatic factor (items 3. sleep disturbance, 4. fatigue, and 5. appetite changes; RMSEA = 0.034, RMSEA 90% CI = 0.032–0.036, TLI = 0.984, CFI = 0.988). To evaluate measurement invariance, we then conducted single-group and multiple-group CFAs to carry out the 5 steps of measurement invariance testing. Dimensional, configural, weak factorial, strong factorial, and strict factorial invariance was established for the PHQ-9 across the sex, race/ethnicity, and education level groups, as all models demonstrated close fit and the ΔCFI was < 0.010 for all steps. Conclusions and Relevance: Using a U.S. representative sample, we determined that a two-factor solution for the PHQ-9 with a cognitive/affective factor and a somatic factor is invariant across sex, race/ethnicity, and education level groups. Therefore, clinically, the PHQ-9 is an acceptable measure to utilize in major U.S. sociodemographic groups, extending the use of this depression screener from the primary care clinic to the community. Additionally, we show that PHQ-9 cognitive/affective and somatic subscale scores have the same meaning and can be compared across major U.S. sociodemographic groups and provide a consistent, evidence-based approach to computing PHQ-9 subscale scores to be used in future studies.

This PhD thesis deals with the use of structural methods of objects identification for industrial robots operation. First, the present state of knowledge in the field is described, i.e. the whole process of objects recognition with the aid of common methods of the syntactic analysis. The main disadvantage of these methods is that is impossible to recognize objects whose digitalized image is corrupted in some ways (due to excessive noise or image disturbances), objects are therefore deformed. Further, other methods for the recognition of deformed objects are described. These methods use structural description of objects for object recognition, i.e. methods which determine the distance between attribute descriptions of images. The core part of this PhD thesis begins in Chapter 5, where deformation grammars, capable of description of all possible object deformations, are described. The only complication in the analysis is the ambiguity of the deformation grammar, which lowers the effectiveness of the analysis. Further, PhD thesis deals with the selection and modification of a proper parser, which is able to analyze a deformation grammar effectively. Three parsers are described: the modified Earley parser, the modified Tomita parser and the modified hybrid LRE(k) parser. As for the modified Earley’s parser, ways of its effective implementation are described. One of the necessary parts of the object recognition is providing the invariances, which this PhD thesis covers in detail, too. Finally, the results of described algorithms are mentioned (successfulness and speed of deformed objects recognition) and suggested testing environment and implemented algorithms are described. In conclusion, all determined possibilities of deformation grammars and their results are summarized.

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This thesis addresses the issue of the time variability of the fine structure constant, alpha. Recent claims of a varying alpha are set against the established standards of quantum electrodynamical theory and experiments. A study of the feasibility of extracting data on the time dependence of alpha using particles in Penning traps is compared to the results obtained by existing methods, including those using astrophysical data and those obtained in atomic clock experiments. Suggestions are made on the nature of trapped particles and the trapping fields.

The Performance Assessment and Evaluation System (PAES) is used by all major universities in the state of Utah to measure the effective teaching skills of preservice candidates as they progress through their teaching preparation program. The resulting ratings are used to make high-stakes decisions relating to course completion as well as recommendation for licensure. This study analyzes the factor structure and tests for measurement invariance of PAES ratings assigned to 663 elementary education candidates at Brigham Young University across two measurement occasions. The candidates were rated by 30 clinical faculty associates. This study also examines the degree to which differential rater effects impact the PAES ratings of these candidates. A bifactor model, with a general factor measuring effective teaching skills measured through observation, and a specific factor measuring effective teaching skills evaluated through conversation best fit the model. Evidence of measurement invariance was found between evaluations completed for Practicum 1 and Practicum 2 candidates. This study also found that differential rater effects impact the PAES ratings of individual candidates, indicating that a candidate's rating may depend on which rater completed the evaluation. Similar research studies should be conducted to analyze the quality of PAES ratings of teacher candidates in the various secondary education programs at BYU. In addition, since the PAES is used at other teacher preparation colleges and universities in Utah, similar research studies should be conducted to examine the quality of PAES ratings of teacher candidates at these other institutions.