Populations in developed and developing countries are becoming increasingly sedentary and the adverse health effects of relatively sedentary lifestyles, the so called lifestyle diseases, are now obvious. However, moderately vigorous physical activity is positively linked via a cause-and-effect relationship with a range of improved health outcomes. Broadly, current physical activity recommendations suggest that adults should achieve a total of at least 30 minutes a day of at least moderate intensity physical activity on five or more days of the week; however, estimates suggest that the majority of adults in the Western World do not meet these recommendations. Many of the factors involved in the initiation and long-term maintenance of physical activity are not fully understood. Considering the rapid pace of technological development and the general move away from labour-based economies, it does appear that the required level of physical activity necessary for optimal health needs to come from leisure-time activity– specifically, planned, regular, moderately vigorous exercise and/or sport. Unfortunately, many people experience great difficulty in engaging with and maintaining a physically active lifestyle and typically there is a rather large gap between what people know to be healthy and what they actually do. The general aim of this project was to design, implement and evaluate the clinical, social and behavioural effectiveness of a buddy-Motivational Interviewing intervention (buddy-MI) in assisting relatively sedentary adults to adopt and maintain regular physical activity for the purpose of improving their cardio-respiratory fitness, health, and quality of life. Specific aims of the intervention included formally involving social support (via the self-selected motivational-buddy) and strengthening individuals’ motivation for and movement toward their physical activity goals. The experimental intervention specifically aimed to extend the MI treatment effect by enhancing participants’ commitment to physical activity over time via intra-treatment social support (support provided within treatment sessions) as well as extra-treatment social support (day-to-day support) provided by the motivational-buddy. A fundamental was to deliver the intervention in a format that could realistically be implemented within typical primary care settings, workplaces, schools or other similar setting: to work towards healthier more active communities and to potentially reduce health system resource utilisation. Using a repeated-measures pragmatic parallel group randomised controlled trial (RCT) design, relatively sedentary adolescents and adults, in stable health, recruited from a university campus population were allocated to one of two interventions. In the experimental intervention, participants were supported by a self-selected motivational-buddy and they received 2-4 sessions of buddy-MI over a period of 12-months (participant determined schedule) as well as pro-active follow-up emails. The control intervention was standard care MI, and the same email follow-up as in the experimental group but without the additional support of a motivational-buddy. The main outcomes were self-reported physical activity, cardio-respiratory fitness and health related quality of life. These primary outcomes were measured at four time-points over the 12-months intervention and follow-up period and quantitative methods were used to analyse the data. Qualitative data were also analysed and presented in relation to the motivational-buddy component of the intervention. The study evaluated the feasibility and incremental effectiveness of motivational-buddy support compared to one-on-one MI in people who had expressed an interest in becoming more physically active. It used a novel intervention design incorporating self-selected motivational-buddies in an effort to mitigate the twin problems of poor adherence and behavioural regression that are commonly associated with physical activity promotion programmes. The intervention was found to have merit and the potential implications for the health-care system, and the wider community, are discussed.

Due to the passage of Public Law 94-142 (1975), widespread attempts have been made to integrate children who have handicaps into settings with their non handicapped peers. Although integrated settings may provide the opportunity for social interaction to occur between children with and without handicaps, often interaction does not occur. In order to address the issue of how to best facilitate appropriate interactions in integrated settings, specialized programs such as the FMS buddy system (Quintero, Phelps, Striefel, & Killoran, 1987) have been developed to promote positive social interactions between children with and without handicaps. One important aspect programs such as the buddy system have not fully considered is the differential impact a non handicapped child could have on the level of social interaction of the child with handicaps. The impact the non-handicapped buddy could make if constantly paired with the same child with handicaps may be different than the one a non-handicapped child could make if paired, over time , in an alternating sequence with different children who have handicaps. In response to the question of possible differential impact, a single subject multiple baseline design was utilized to compare the effect constant buddies and rotating buddies had on the social interactions of 8 children who had handicaps. The intervention included training the buddies on how to interact with children who have handicaps and providing the opportunity for the children with and without handicaps to play together. Treatment effects were measured by direct observations of social interactions between the children with and without handicaps during free play and buddy sessions, sociometric measures, and attitude measures. Results indicated that pairing children who have handicaps with a non-handicapped buddy increased social interactions between children with and without handicaps during buddy sessions. The level of interaction achieved during buddy sessions was not fully generalized to subsequent free play sessions. Buddies from constant dyads rated their playmates who had handicaps sociometrically higher than buddies from rotating dyads. Non-handicapped children who served as buddies rated their buddy experience favorably. Suggestions for future research in this area are made.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, the potential of large language models (LLMs) remains a focal point of exploration, especially in the domain of education. This research delves into the capabilities of AI-enhanced chatbots, with a spotlight on the "Teacher Assistant" & "Study Buddy" approaches. The study highlights the role of AI in offering adaptive learning experiences and personalized recommendations. As educational institutions and platforms increasingly turn to AI-driven solutions, understanding the intricacies of how LLMs can be harnessed to create meaningful and accurate educational content becomes paramount.The research adopts a systematic and multi-faceted methodology. At its core, the study investigates the interplay between prompt construction, engineering techniques, and the resulting outputs of the LLM. Two primary methodologies are employed: the application of prompt structuring techniques and the introduction of advanced prompt engineering methods. The former involves a progressive application of techniques like persona and template, aiming to discern their individual and collective impacts on the LLM's outputs. The latter delves into more advanced techniques, such as the few-shot prompt and chain-of-thought prompt, to gauge their influence on the quality and characteristics of the LLM's responses. Complementing these is the "Study Buddy" approach, where curricula from domains like biology, mathematics, and physics are utilized as foundational materials for the experiments.The findings from this research are poised to have significant implications for the future of AI in education. By offering a comprehensive understanding of the variables that influence an LLM's performance, the study paves the way for the development of more refined and effective AI-driven educational tools. As educators and institutions grapple with the challenges of modern education, tools that can generate accurate, relevant, and diverse educational content can be invaluable. This thesis not only contributes to the academic understanding of LLMs and provides practical insights that can shape the future of AI-enhanced education, but as education continues to evolve, the findings underscore the need for ongoing exploration and refinement to fully leverage AI's benefits in the educational sector

Due to the passage of Public Law 94-142 (1975), widespread attempts have been made to integrate children who have handicaps into settings with their nonhandicapped peers. Although integrated settings may provide the opportunity for social interaction to occur between children with and without handicaps, often interaction does not occur. In order to address the issue of how to best facilitate appropriate interactions in integrated settings, specialized programs such as the FMS buddy system (Quintero, Phelps, Striefel, & Killoran, 1987) have been developed to promote positive social interactions between children with and without handicaps. One important aspect programs such as the buddy system have not fully considered is the differential impact a nonhandicapped child could have on the level of social interaction of the child with handicaps. The impact the nonhandicapped buddy could make if constantly paired with the same child with handicaps may be different than the one a nonhandicapped child could make if paired, over time, in an alternating sequence with different children who have handicaps. In response to the question of possible differential impact, a single subject multiple baseline design was utilized to compare the effect constant buddies and rotating buddies had on the social interactions of 8 children who had handicaps. The intervention included training the buddies on how to interact with children who have handicaps and providing the opportunity for the children with and without handicaps to play together. Treatment effects were measured by direct observations of social interactions between the children with and without handicaps during free play and buddy sessions, sociometric measures, and attitude measures. Results indicated that pairing children who have handicaps with a nonhandicapped buddy increased social interactions between children with and without handicaps during buddy sessions. The level of interaction achieved during buddy sessions was not fully generalized to subsequent free play sessions. Buddies from constant dyads rated their playmates who had handicaps sociometrically higher than buddies from rotating dyads. Non handicapped children who served as buddies rated their buddy experience favorably. Suggestions for future research in this area are made.

The purpose of the present investigation was to attempt to improve the adjustment of students transferring to a new high school part way through the year by the introduction of a buddy scheme. During the period between March 7th and September 18th, 1978, 54 new students were randomly allocated to an experimental group (i.e. paired with a buddy) or to a 'no buddy' control group for three weeks from the date of their enrolment. The buddies consisted of 12 volunteers from each of years seven to ten, who attended four training sessions with the counsellor (four for each form). The training centred round a discussion of their feelings and needs when encountering new school situations and led to a delineation of practical things which could be done to help new students. Emphasis was also given to communication skills. After the new students had been at the school for a month (or 20 school days), they completed L.S. Wrightsraan's School Morale scale and a student questionnaire which provided two measures of adjustment, viz. the students' perception of whether or not they had formed new friendships and their 'adjustment' to school. At the end of their first two months, the number of days absent (apart from those for sickness) were noted. There was no significant difference between the adjustment of transfer students in the experimental group compared to the control group as measured by the four outcome measures. That is, there was no significant difference between the two groups as measured by School Morale scores, their perception of the formation of new friendships, adjustment to school (a questionnaire measurement) or the mean number of days absent. Buddies with effective communication skills were successful in helping new students make a satisfactory adjustment to their new school. The continuation of the scheme was favoured both by the buddies and by the transfer students. Buddies felt that the scheme helped new students to settle in more quickly to the classes and to make friends. Transfer students felt that the scheme helped them to learn about the school very quickly, to meet the teachers and to make friends.

In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of CQ-Buddy, a peer-to-peer (p2p) continuous query (CQ) processing system that is distributed, and highly-scalable. CQ-Buddy exploits the differences in capabilities (processing and memory) of peers and load-balances the tasks across powerful and weak peers. Our main contributions are as follows: First, CQ-Buddy introduces the notion of pervasive continuous queries to tackle the frequent disconnected problems common in a peer-to-peer environment. Second, CQ-Buddy allows for inter-sharing and intra-sharing in the processing of continuous queries amongst peers. Third, CQ-Buddy peers perform query-centric load balancing for overloaded data source providers by acting as proxies. We have conducted extensive studies to evaluate CQ-Buddy’s performance. Our results show that CQ-Buddy is highly scalable, and is able to process continuous queries in an effective and efficient manner. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

As well as critiquing my own abilities throughout the writing process, the essay aims to explore and examine the various models of friendship between central male protagonists and the evolution of masculinity and homosociality within the buddy movie/bromance genre which has been a staple of the American film industry since the before the 1950s. In addition, I will note if these on-screen relationships have been the product of social change and wide spread acceptance of an evolving idea of what constitutes ‘masculinity’ and if, in turn, these new boundaries of homosociality have been, in any way genre changing. Alongside this essay I intend to create a piece of creative writing within the bromance comedy genre set against the backdrop of Montclair New Jersey in present day which explores the difficulties and solidarities of friendship between five old college friends. This film intends to fit in with contemporary bromance and appeal to the market demographic of 18 – 35 males by conforming to accepted and expected aspects of the genre such as, friendship, exploration, crisis, discovery and, most importantly, comedy.

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Large physical memory modules are necessary to meet performance demands of today's ap- plications but can be a major bottleneck in terms of power consumption during idle periods or when systems are running with workloads which do not stress all the plugged memory resources. Contribution of physical memory in overall system power consumption becomes even more signi cant when CPU cores run on low power modes during idle periods with hardware support like Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling. Our experiments show that even 10% of memory allocations can make references to all the banks of physical memory on a long running system primarily due to the randomness in page allocation. We also show that memory hot-remove or memory migration for large blocks is often restricted, in a long running system, due to allocation policies of current Linux VM which mixes movable and unmovable pages. Hence it is crucial to improve page migration for large contiguous blocks for a practical realization of power management support provided by the hardware. Operating systems can play a decisive role in effectively utilizing the power management support of modern DIMMs like PASR(Partial Array Self Refresh) in these situations but have not been using them so far. We propose three different approaches for optimizing memory power consumption by in- ducing bank boundary awareness in the standard buddy allocator of Linux kernel as well as distinguishing user and kernel memory allocations at the same time to improve the movability of memory sections (and hence memory-hotplug) by page migration techniques. Through a set of minimal changes in the standard buddy system of Linux VM, we have been able to reduce the number of active memory banks significantly (upto 80%) as well as to improve performance of memory-hotplug framework (upto 85%).

Students with internalizing behaviors are often overlooked in terms of receiving interventions that could change academic outcomes and prevent problems that could have serious implications, including social withdrawal, social isolation, and suicidal ideation. Recent research has found the use of social emotional learning (SEL), school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS), and social skill instruction, to be effective in treating students with both internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. The use of peers has also shown promise in helping students with behavior problems. In this study, a multiple baseline across participants' design was used across two playgrounds to evaluate a buddy bench intervention, which utilized peers to help socially withdrawn students increase social engagement and peer interactions and decrease social isolation. All students (N = 448) in grades 1st through 6th were observed during the pre-lunch recess period. Results revealed that from baseline to intervention phases there was a decrease of between 19% (on the 4th to 6th grade playground) and 24% (on the 1st to 3rd grade playground) in the number of students engaged in solitary behavior on the playground. The majority of students reported positive attitudes towards the intervention. Teachers reported mixed feelings about the social validity of the Buddy Bench. Limitations and implications are discussed.