This study seeks to understand how school processes affect disproportionate minority contact within the Hardin County Juvenile Justice System. A study completed by Lovell and Drummond (2016) in conjunction with the Hardin County BRIDGES Council, is used as the foundation for the current research. The original research, along with several others, examined disproportionate minority contact (DMC) after the student had been referred from their respective schools to the juvenile court system. The current study investigates 858 juvenile court records, with permission of the Hardin County Juvenile Judges, and examines school information included in the court records related to the student in correlation to race. School data was collected from the court cases to identify points of DMC that begin within the school system, which ultimately led to their referral to the juvenile court system.

Limited access to financial services is known as a major constraint to agricultural development (FAO, 2002). Farmers need liquidity to face agricultural expenses throughout the production cycle but mainly at the beginning. Mainstream financial institutions are reluctant to serve the agricultural sector for several reasons. First, they consider the sector to be highly risky with low performance. Also, agricultural activities depend on the weather, they take place in remote rural areas, and commodities prices are volatile. All these aspects make it hard for standard banks to reach their profit goals when lending to farmers. Since microfinance was conceived, it has generated a lot of hope for alleviating poverty in low-income countries. Microfinance provides the poor with access to affordable capital by granting low-income individuals with loans they would not otherwise have access to, because of economic and geographic constraints. The goal of the dissertation is to examine the role and the importance of microfinance in the agricultural sector of developing countries. A survey took place in October 2017, in both rural and urban areas of Benin and involved 750 agricultural households. Three different agricultural zones were selected: the North-East (cotton zone); the Center (tubers and cashew nut zone) and the South (a region with special crops such as vegetables, pineapple, palm tree, exotic plants). The study focuses on agricultural loans. It includes clients of the major microfinance institution in Benin: FECECAM - Faîtière des Caisses d’Epargne et de Crédit Agricole Mutuel. This research contributes to the literature in several ways. The study allows shedding light on the effects of agricultural loans, specifically, on households’ efficiency and labor employment, which are mostly overlooked in the microfinance literature. To overcome selection bias in microcredit evaluation, the research employs a pipeline design. Control and treatment groups consist of individuals who have chosen to participate in the microfinance program. The loan treatment considered is the experience with loans which includes program entry timing, loan take-up frequency, and the average amount of loan obtained over the 2012-2017 period. The study employs a cluster analysis technique to create reliable comparable groups. Multiple variables and indicators are analyzed. A descriptive analysis of loan impact on farmers’ labor input choices shows that past loans have residual effects on both hired and family labor use. Farm loans, especially those obtained for farm machinery significantly reduce expenditure on hired labor but more family labor is employed using machine loans while other loan categories reduced the use of family labor. The evaluation of the whole-farm efficiency of borrowers in the presence of agricultural loans reveals significant technical and allocative errors leading to profit loss in all studied regions. However, experience with loans significantly increases farmers’ whole-farm efficiency, particularly in the North. Finally, the assessment of well-being indicators suggests that those farm loans have a significant positive impact on sampled recipients’ net farm income, food security and food quality statuses. Agricultural loans also have a positive impact on women’s empowerment. The monitoring and implementation mechanism of FECECAM played a crucial role in the success of its loan programs.

Nationwide concerns include disproportionate discipline referrals and suspensions of certain student groups and the associated negative student outcomes. The state's department of education cited a school district for suspending Black students with disabilities (SWD) at more than 3 times the rate of all other student groups; yet, the complex nature of the disciplinary disproportionality in this district was unknown. The purpose of this study was to investigate how student-related characteristics including race/ethnicity, gender, age, grade level, disability status, and school location, may predict number of discipline referrals, types of discipline referrals, and types of suspensions issued to students. Guided by the theory of behaviorism, this nonexperimental, ex post facto study examined archival discipline data for the 5523 students who received at least 1 office referral during the 2015-2016 school year. Chi-square analyses showed SWD had higher numbers of referrals, received referrals for subjective offenses, and were more likely to receive out-of-school suspension than no suspension or in-school suspension compared to nondisabled students. Regression analyses indicated students who were Black, male, identified as SWD, or in secondary school were at significantly greater risk of office referral and exclusionary discipline than other student groups. By understanding the patterns of discipline outcomes associated with student-related characteristics, school administrators within the local district are now able to select and implement evidence-based practices that may reduce exclusionary discipline, allowing all students to participate equally in school. Over time, these practices may lead to positive student outcomes including higher school engagement and increased graduation rates.

Exclusionary discipline in school contributes to gender and racial disproportionality in the juvenile justice system and marginalizes African American girls. Using the social justice and rational choice theories as the foundation, the purpose of this case study was to explore the relationship between the criminalization of behavior in schools, racial bias, and gender stereotypes contribute to the overrepresentation of the school to prison pipeline in Virginia. The central research question focused on the relationship between the criminalization of behavior in schools, racial bias, and gender stereotypes on the overrepresentation of African American girls in the school to prison pipeline. Employing a qualitative case study design, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 8 African American women (ages 20-30) and surveys from 12 educators. Other data included school discipline and juvenile justice reports from the Virginia Department of Education and Office of Juvenile Justice. The interview data were coded and analyzed using matrix and thematic analysis. Three findings emerged from the thematic analysis from document data. First, participants perceive diversionary programs, community partnership and restorative justice programs create safe and positive learning environments. Second, there are opportunities for policymakers to use their influence to promote social equity. Finally, zero tolerance policies are ineffective. The positive social change implications from this study include recommendations to policymakers to implement restorative justice programs to ensure that all students learn in a positive environment. These actions will benefit all students in public schools and decrease racial disparities in schools and the juvenile justice system.

Educational Intervention to Impact Parental Decisions to Consent to Human Papillomavirus Vaccine by Tawa B. Ibikunle-Salami MSN, Indiana Wesleyan University, 2010 BSN, Indiana Wesleyan University, 2005 Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Nursing Practice Walden University September 2015 Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is a global health issue that is transmitted sexually and affects both genders. Evidence shows that approximately 79 million people are affected in the United States with 14 million newly affected yearly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that teens and young adults under age 25 are at particular risk, so it is important to begin the vaccination series between 9 and 17 years of age. Parental voluntary acceptance of HPV vaccine for their minor children was noted as a problem in a clinic in Northwest Indiana, and 8% clinic HPV series completion rate is significantly lower than the targeted federal goal of 80% by 2020. A literature review indicated that an educational intervention provided by healthcare professionals could serve as one of the strongest predictors of HPV vaccine acceptance. The purpose of this project was to develop an evidence-based parental educational process to support providers' influence on parents of children ages 9 to 17 to provide consent for the HPV vaccine. The project goals focused on parental knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes. The clinic providers will utilize assessment tools validated by experts and evidence-based educational materials to promote HPV and HPV vaccine awareness. The theoretical foundations of the project were the theory of reasoned action and Pathman's pipeline that target the parents directly through individual educational sessions to achieve knowledge gain and behavioral change. Implementation of educational materials by clinic providers may improve parental knowledge of HPV and the HPV vaccine acceptance. Social change may result from the integration of the project into clinical practice to increase the HPV vaccine acceptance rates, which will ultimately reduce the effects of HPV and its sequelae leading to long-term wellness promotion.

La cristallisation des hydrates pendant la production de pétrole est une source de risques, surtout liés au bouchage des lignes de production dû à l’agglomération des hydrates. Pendant l'extraction de pétrole, l'huile et l'eau circulent dans le pipeline et forment une émulsion instable. La phase eau se combine avec les composants d'hydrocarbures légers et peut former des hydrates. La cristallisation des hydrates a été intensivement étudiée, principalement à faible fraction d’eau. Cependant, lorsque le champ de pétrole devient mature, la fraction d’eau augmente et peut devenir la phase dominante, un système peu étudié concernant à la formation d'hydrates. Plusieurs techniques peuvent être combinées pour éviter ou remédier la formation d'hydrates. Récemment, une nouvelle classe d'additifs a commencé à être étudiée : Inhibiteurs d'Hydrates à Bas Dosage (LDHI), divisés en Inhibiteurs Cinétiques (KHI-LDHI) et anti-agglomérants (AA-LDHI).Ce travail est une étude paramétrique de la formation d'hydrates à partir de l'émulsion, en variant la fraction d’eau, le débit, en absence et en présence d’AA-LDHI. Les expériences ont été réalisées sur la boucle d'écoulement Archimède, qui est en mesure de reproduire les conditions de la mer profonde. L'objectif de cette étude est d'améliorer la compréhension de la formation d'hydrate et de comprendre comment l'additif dispersant évite l'agglomération. Pour ce faire, un modèle comportemental de la cristallisation pour les systèmes sans et avec additif a été développé. Il a également été proposé une technique pour déterminer la phase continue du système et un mécanisme d'action pour l'anti-agglomérant a été suggéré. / Crystallization of hydrates during oil production is a major source of hazards, mainly related to flow lines plugging after hydrate agglomeration. During the petroleum extraction, oil and water circulate in the flow line, forming an unstable emulsion. The water phase in combination with light hydrocarbon components can form hydrates. The crystallization of hydrates has been extensively studied, mainly at low water content systems. However, as the oil field matures, the water fraction increases and can become the dominant phase, a system less known in what concerns hydrate formation. Actually, several techniques can be combined to avoid or remediate hydrate formation. Recently, a new class of additives called Low Dosage Hydrate Inhibitor (LDHI) started to be studied, they are classified as Kinetic Hydrate Inhibitors (KHI-LDHI) and Anti-Agglomerants (AA-LDHI).This work is a parametric study about hydrate formation from emulsion systems ranging from low to high water content, where different flow rates and the anti-agglomerant presence were investigated. The experiments were performed at the Archimède flow loop, which is able to reproduce deep sea conditions. The goal of this study is enhancing the knowledge in hydrate formation and comprehending how the dispersant additive acts to avoid agglomeration. For this matter, it was developed a crystallization topological model for the systems without and with additive. A technique to determine the system continuous phase and a mechanism of the anti-agglomerant action from the chord length measurements were also proposed.

In the lead up to the 2011 official U.S. State Department decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline--running from the Alberta, Canada Tar Sands to the Gulf of Mexico--the Department held nine public meetings in Fall 2011 in the six U.S. states through which the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project would pass (the Department rejected the proposal; however, a new proposal is under consideration as of this writing). The transcripts of these public meetings are publicly accessible. Understanding the pipeline as a project of trans-national trade and the global circulation of petrochemicals--including global emissions of carbon dioxide--this paper hones in on one region within one U.S. state: the Nebraskan Sandhills, a cattle ranching region of grass-stabilized sand dunes and inter-dunal valleys stretching 20,000-square miles across the north-central part of the state, under which rests a vast hydrological network, including the largest freshwater aquifer in the world - the Ogallala Aquifer. This essay argues that we can read the Public Comments as a form of poetic expression, paying attention to the ways the State Department transcription process formatted the oral testimonies into an "official" and sanctioned public document -- instituting line-breaks and other syntactical procedures. Using the tools of literary-critical analysis, this paper makes a case that we can read the Comments as a form of documentary poetry - in the tradition of such American modernist poets as Charles Reznikoff, Muriel Rukeyser, and George Oppen - that explore ecological questions while experimenting with lyric structures. The Comments reveal competing environmental stakeholders' stances - on such topics as Prairie systems ecology and the neoliberal economics of private-public capital markets. In doing so, they subsequently express citizens' various understandings of themselves in relation to landscape, ecology, technology, and geo-politics.

Teacher educators need to develop better teaching methods in order to, ultimately, serve future students in classrooms that are increasing in diversity. It is vital that education majors do more than hear and read about social justice issues facing their prospective students; for them to both understand it and retain it, they need deeper interaction with the issues and alternative strategies for resolving them. This model for using teaching cases may enable teacher educators to demonstrate the relevance of their coursework to their midlevel education students, ultimately enhancing learning gains. Of equal importance to their professional development, prospective teachers need to not only be prepared, but to know they are prepared. The model developed from this research may provide the venue to increasing their teacher efficacy. The model engages all four efficacy-building elements (Bandura, 1995), mastery, verbal, physiological and vicarious. Efficacy is developed verbally as participants discuss possible alternative solutions to the teaching cases. This discussion also affords both physiological development when responses enter Bakhtin's (1983) interstitial spaces, spaces of disagreement, argument, discomfort, and vicarious development of efficacy as students experience the teaching dilemmas of experienced teachers but experiences they realize are likely to be in their own futures. Perhaps the most challenging developer of efficacy through this model is mastery. Mastery can be developed during the "rehearsals" of seminar discussions of teaching cases (Cambourne, 1995), or it may develop within the internship-assigned classroom; for some it may require extensive classroom experience to achieve. This study's participants were a midlevel preservice teacher cohort divided between urban and suburban settings for their field-based internships. Intrinsic to the study was critical literacy and the recursive use of teaching cases focused on underlying social justice issues. Pretest and posttest scores from the Ohio State Teacher Efficacy Scale confirmed significant gains in teacher efficacy but could not validate the teaching cases as the causality. Qualitative data, however, did confirm the validity of using teaching cases with this specific study.

L'évolution constante des processeurs vers des architectures proposant des capacités superscalaires, de parallélisme au niveau des instructions, de prédiction, de spéculation et la multiplication des niveaux de hiérarchie mémoire donnent de plus en plus d'importance au travail du compilateur.<br />Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons aux transformations du programme source destinées à l'optimisation dans la chaîne de compilation, et plus particulièrement à une transformation appelée décalage d'instructions.<br />Cette transformation sert de base au pipeline logiciel, elle a une influence sur le parallélisme au niveau des instructions et l'utilisation des registres.<br />Elle intervient également comme composante des techniques de parallélisation de boucles par ordonnancement affine.<br />Nous avons voulu mieux comprendre les perspectives offertes par le décalage d'instructions, savoir quels objectifs il permettait d'atteindre mais aussi savoir quels problèmes de décalage restaient difficiles.<br />Pour cela nous avons étudié le décalage d'instructions dans plusieurs contextes plus ou moins proches, et apporté des contributions à chacun d'entre eux.<br /><br />Dans le cadre du pipeline logiciel, nous proposons un algorithme polynomial pour déterminer le décalage le plus à même de produire un maximum de parallélisme au niveau des instructions, et une étude expérimentale de l'efficacité absolue de la technique à l'aide de l'outil logiciel que nous avons réalisé dans ce but : PASTAGA (pour Plate-forme d'Analyse Statistique et de Tests d'Algorithmes sur Graphes Aléatoires).<br />Dans le cadre de l'utilisation des registres (stage scheduling), de la parallélisation de boucle et de la localité, nous apportons des réponses aux problèmes de décalage d'instructions associés~: complexité, solutions exactes, approximations.

<p>Naturally occurring arsenic in ground water is currently threatening millions of people’s lives in Bangladesh and has emerged as one of the world’s largest water pollution and environmental disasters. Various studies have been conducted in order to find a solution to the problem and several mitigation projects have been conducted with various results. In many cases the mitigation options provided have failed in terms of sustainability, why there is an impatient drive to find the solution that can solve the problem permanently. Since technical solutions appear to be hard to transform into practical implementation many professionals are advocating the use of public participation in sustainable project planning and implementation in order to make the project successful. This Minor Field Study focuses on how an environmental problem can be managed through social processes. The main aim of this study is to investigate peoples’ experiences of public participation and project planning from two rural pipeline water supply projects and discuss how these experiences relate to how ideas about public participation might be used for sustainable project planning. To do this I have studied three key groups of actors: national development professionals, project professionals and local project beneficiaries. The aim is also to get a deeper understanding of how public participation within water supply management can be used and further developed for project sustainability. The results show that the implementing organisation has used a project implementation plan with a vision that public participation motivated by sustainability and cost-efficiency will lead to a process towards collective action. The objective is that the users, through joint ownership, takes full responsibility for the project and its future planning. To enable this, learning is a prerequisite given that without understanding and knowledge of how to operate the water supply system, the project and the system will fall short. A learning platform has also been found as a prerequisite for maintaining of public participation, and for interest and motivation of being involved at all. The theory argues for the importance of involvement of all for a sustainable project process, nevertheless is this not made possible in reality. Due to socio-cultural traditions where women are not accepted to attend public meetings or be involved in decision-making, the empowering process that public participation might facilitate, have been neglected. Further have those who are incapable of paying regularly for access to fresh drinking water been excluded from the projects. To attain the efficient bottom-up action wanted to achieve project sustainability, empowerment in combination with public participation is necessary. An improved methodology of how public participation can be integrated in project planning is compulsory, why more practical experience and continuous project evaluations is needed.</p>