4 pp. / REPLACES 182: MAKING THE BEST YOUTH BETTER: PIECING TOGETHER THE 4 ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF POSITIVE YOUTH / Youth development is the continual growth process in which all youth are invested in meeting their basic personal and social needs to feel safe, well cared for, valued, useful, and emotionally grounded. Scientists have long studied what youth need to be successful and contributing adults. The purpose of this set of fact sheets is to provide research based information to youth development professionals, volunteers and youth on the four essential elements of positive youth development.

3 pp. / REPLACES 182: MAKING THE BEST YOUTH BETTER: PIECING TOGETHER THE 4 ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF POSITIVE YOUTH / Youth development is the continual growth process in which all youth are invested in meeting their basic personal and social needs to feel safe, well cared for, valued, useful, and emotionally grounded. Scientists have long studied what youth need to be successful and contributing adults. The purpose of this set of fact sheets is to provide research based information to youth development professionals, volunteers and youth on the four essential elements of positive youth development.

3 pp. / REPLACES 182: MAKING THE BEST YOUTH BETTER: PIECING TOGETHER THE 4 ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF POSITIVE YOUTH / Youth development is the continual growth process in which all youth are invested in meeting their basic personal and social needs to feel safe, well cared for, valued, useful, and emotionally grounded. Scientists have long studied what youth need to be successful and contributing adults. The purpose of this set of fact sheets is to provide research based information to youth development professionals, volunteers and youth on the four essential elements of positive youth development.

3 pp. / REPLACES 182: MAKING THE BEST YOUTH BETTER: PIECING TOGETHER THE 4 ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF POSITIVE YOUTH / Youth development is the continual growth process in which all youth are invested in meeting their basic personal and social needs to feel safe, well cared for, valued, useful, and emotionally grounded. Scientists have long studied what youth need to be successful and contributing adults. The purpose of this set of fact sheets is to provide research based information to youth development professionals, volunteers and youth on the four essential elements of positive youth development.

3 pp. / REPLACES 182: MAKING THE BEST YOUTH BETTER: PIECING TOGETHER THE 4 ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF POSITIVE YOUTH / Youth development is the continual growth process in which all youth are invested in meeting their basic personal and social needs to feel safe, well cared for, valued, useful, and emotionally grounded. Scientists have long studied what youth need to be successful and contributing adults. The purpose of this set of fact sheets is to provide research based information to youth development professionals, volunteers and youth on the four essential elements of positive youth development.

This study of Ecuador under Gran Colombia comprises more than a catalogue of the obstacles underlying the failure of Simon Bolívar's experiment in statecraft. While the distinct nature of the regional and local problems of the southern departments add to that diagnosis, they also stand apart as factors in the formation of the Republic of Ecuador. The Liberator's determination to maintain the territorial integrity of the audiencia of Quito as a part of the viceroyalty of New Granada prevented the potential partitioning of that region between Peru and Colombia. Colombian military assistance enabled the fleeting Republic of Guayaquil to play a crucial role in the liberation of the audiencia. This ensured a patriotic legacy for Guayaquil compatible with that of Quito in the formation of Ecuadorian national identity. The special treatment accorded the Southern Departments by Bolívar's use of his extraordinary faculties and his later authority as dictator maintained the regional identity of Ecuador. The inability of the Colombian government to effectively respond to the local problems of the Southern Departments undermined the legitimacy of that regime. In contrast, the efficiency of the military administration imposed upon the departments by Bolívar enhanced his personal authority. Also, at the expense of Gran Colombia, the Liberator fostered an embryonic administrative centralism around the leadership of one of his most loyal officers, General Juan José Flores. The era of Ecuador under Gran Colombia witnessed the continuation of the colonial economic system beneath the superstructure of republican politics. In recognition of the distinct nature of southern society, Bolívar formally sanctioned that continuity, ultimately replacing the few liberal reforms attempted in the south with a return to colonial institutions. Within this framework the local elites of Quito, Guayaquil, and Cuenca remained secure in their society. Within the decade of its existence as part of Gran Columbia, Ecuador demonstrated its own dynamic elements, both local and regional in nature, that gradually coalesced to form an embryonic national identity. The emergence of the Republic of Ecuador in May 1830 was an affirmation of that historical development.

A system is data independent in a type T if the only operations allowed on variables of type T are input, output, assignment and equality testing. This property can be exploited to give procedures for the automatic verification of such systems independently of the instance of the type T. Alloy is an extension of first-order logic for modelling software systems. Alloy has a fully automatic analyzer which attempts to refute Alloy formulas by searching for counterexamples within a finite scope. However, failure to find a counterexample does not prove the formula correct. A small model theorem is a theorem which shows that if a formula has a model then it has a model within some finite scope. The contribution of this thesis is to give a small model theorem which applies when modelling data-independent systems in Alloy. The theorem allows one to detect automatically whether an Alloy formula is data independent in some type T and then calculate a threshold scope for T, thereby completing the analysis of the automatic analyzer with respect to the type T. We derive the small model theorem using a model-theoretic approach. We build on the standard semantics of the Alloy language and introduce a more abstract interpretation of formulas, by way of a Galois insertion. This more abstract interpretation gives the same truth value as the original interpretation for many formulas. Indeed we show that this property holds for any formula built with a limited set of language constructors which we call data-independent constructors. The more abstract interpretation is designed so that it often lies within a finite scope and we can calculate whether this is the case and exactly how big the finite scope need be from the types of the free variables in the formula. In this way we can show that if a formula has any instance or counterexample at all then it has one within a threshold scope, the size of which we can calculate.

This Thesis collection contains a critical preface and five stories. The preface, “Reflejos y Reflexiones” (translated: Images and Thoughts), addresses the issues of writing the cultural or gendered Other; these issues include methodology, literary colonialism, a dialogue between works, and creating distance through defamiliarizing the self. “Perennials” is the story of Noemi Tellez, an immigrant to the U.S. who must choose between working and taking care of her family. In “Load Bearing” Luis, the eldest child, faces his family and friends on one of his last days before moving away to college. “La Monarca” deals with Lily's, the youngest daughter, struggle to mediate a place between her friends and her family. In “Reflections in the River,” Arabela, the second youngest, faces the ghost of an unwanted pregnancy and La Llorona. “La Cocina de Su Madre” is the story of Magda, the oldest daughter, and her own teenage girl, Natalia, as they attempt to find themselves in a new town after moving a thousand miles from home.

High-dimensional data, data in which the number of dimensions exceeds the number of observations, is increasingly common in statistics. The term "ultra-high dimensional" is defined by Fan and Lv (2008) as describing the situation where log(p) is of order O(na) for some a in the interval (0, ½). It arises in many contexts such as gene expression data, proteomic data, imaging data, tomography, and finance, as well as others. High-dimensional data present a challenge to traditional statistical techniques. In traditional statistical settings, models have a small number of features, chosen based on an assumption of what features may be relevant to the response of interest. In the high-dimensional setting, many of the techniques of traditional feature selection become computationally intractable, or does not yield unique solutions. Current research in modeling high-dimensional data is heavily focused on methods that screen the features before modeling; that is, methods that eliminate noise-features as a pre-modeling dimension reduction. Typically noise feature are identified by exploiting properties of independent random variables, thus the term "independence screening." There are methods for modeling high-dimensional data without feature screening first (e.g. LASSO or SCAD), but simulation studies show screen-first methods perform better as dimensionality increases. Many proposals for independence screening exist, but in my literature review certain themes recurred: A) The assumption of sparsity: that all the useful information in the data is actually contained in a small fraction of the features (the "active features"), the rest being essentially random noise (the "inactive" features). B) In many newer methods, initial dimension reduction by feature screening reduces the problem from the high-dimensional case to a classical case; feature selection then proceeds by a classical method. C) In the initial screening, removal of features independent of the response is highly desirable, as such features literally give no information about the response. D) For the initial screening, some statistic is applied pairwise to each feature in combination with the response; the specific statistic chosen so that in the case that the two random variables are independent, a specific known value is expected for the statistic. E) Features are ranked by the absolute difference between the calculated statistic and the expected value of that statistic in the independent case, i.e. features that are most different from the independent case are most preferred. F) Proof is typically offered that, asymptotically, the method retains the true active features with probability approaching one. G) Where possible, an iterative version of the process is explored, as iterative versions do much better at identifying features that are active in their interactions, but not active individually.

Tales of contemporary society, and who gets the right to tell them, is in this internet era something in motion as new platforms for sharing and getting information have arisen. Where traditional media through newspapers, radio or television has historically been so dominant, more and more voices can make it through as access to new platforms increase. In Latin America and in Guatemala, traditional media has been in the hands of the few and the powerful, concentrating economical and political influence that’s wielded through the power of discourse. Seeing this as hegemonic and representing a society where all are not included, alternative media seeks to counter such discourse and power by telling the untold stories by those historically without voice. This study picks up the perceptions, experiences and views of journalists and activists reshaping what we know about media production and the world, all this in a setting, a moment in time in Guatemala, when the structures of hegemonic power are shaken and put into question. By interviewing representatives of a wide scope of the alternative media sector, this thesis gives account for their aims and contributions as well as the general role and importance of alternative media in Guatemala. What it shows us is that alternative media is perceived as a force changing and adding to narratives about prior marginalized issues in the media as well as countering hegemonic power by contributing to empowerment of the citizenry. This study also show us that alternative media is perceived to open up the space for public opinion to a wider group of people in society and that it has a part to play in monitoring media power. Through these conclusions we gain a better understanding for counter hegemonic voices, ideas and movements and their part to play in society.