<p>Elementary School Lunch Programmes: An analysis and a proposal.</p> <p>Where are our six to twelve year old children at noon? What do they do at lunch? Who is responsible for noontime supervision? What attitudes prevail in the minds of parents, educators and politicians regarding lunchtime supervision? Are the needs of parents, children and educators being recognized? If not, what are the social implications of continued current practices?</p> <p>The intent of this project has been to examine these questions in relation to social changes resulting from the inclusion of mothers in the work force.</p> <p>Questionnaire mailings followed by an interview study of educators and other concerned citizens in the Hamilton area, identified legal responsibility for lunchtime child care to be with the school.</p> <p>Based on the conception of lunchtime as a legal inclusion in the school day and the educational potential this time affords, it is proposed that lunchtime be structured into the school's curriculum in the form of an Educational Lunch Programme.</p> <p>It is argued that legal custodial responsibility of the school at lunch be recognized as a realistic social expectation. Lunchtime child care, organized as an Educational Lunch Programme, represents a "need" fulfillment of contemporary society.</p> <p>This paper concludes that continued research and curriculum design decisions are required in the development of the proposed elementary school Educational Lunch Programmes.</p> / Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT)

<p>Cette thèse se propose de montrer comment Queneau, dans son roman Les Fleurs Bleues, utilise sa culture encyclopédique et son intérêt particulier pour les mathématiques afin de construire un objet fini, une architecture verbale où le hasard entrerait peu ou prou.</p> <p>Dans l'introduction, nous classifierons les procédés linguistiques ou structuraux utilisés par l'auteur dans ses romans antérieurs et nous nous fonderons sur cette grille interprètationnelle théorique pour voir en quoi elle s'applique indubitablement aux Fleurs Bleues: c'est â dire étude du titre et de ses implications symboliques, recherche des différentes charpentes structurelles sur lesquelles s'appuie le roman, définition des Fleurs Bleues comme palimpseste historique et littéraire e t analyse des procédés langagiers. Nous terminerons notre mémoire en tentant de donner une interprétation, mathématique et symbolique, globale de l'oeuvre.</p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The purpose of this study is to explore the implications for various government stabilization policies of explicit consideration of market disequilibrium, especially credit rationing in the commercial bank loan market. The analysis centers in each case on the value of the government expenditure multiplier. First, a control or equilibrium version of the model is developed which is consistent with standard macrotheory and which contains a welldescribed banking sector. The results of the simulations with this version of the model confirm that the impact multiplier is larger when the deficit is financed by printing money than when bonds are issued to meet the requirement for funds. However, it is shown that in the long run the bond-financed multiplier is greater than the money-financed multiplier. This version of the model also confirms the possibility raised in the current literature that the bondfinanced case may be unstable. Since the current model has a well developed banking sector, the theory of the government finance restraint is extended to consider the case in which the deficit is financed by transferring the ownership of government bank deposits to the private sector. This case closely resembles the bond-financed case in the short run but it is statically stable. The deposit-financed case is limited, of course, by the initial size of the government deposits. Therefore, the restoration of the level of government deposits by one of the other means of financing is considered. Next, a disequilibrium version of the control model is developed consistent with current literature on disequilibrium phenomena. This version of the model contains a feedback mechanism by which a disequilibrium in one market will affect the decisions in all other markets. The results of the simulations with the disequilibrium model show that the government expenditure impact multiplier may be increased by the presence of credit rationing. In fact the bond-financed case which is unstable in the control version becomes stable under "equilibrium" credit rationing, where the loan rate does not adjust at all. Since the model used in this study is ad hoe, sensitivity analysis is used to investigate the importance of the exact values of the key parameters of the system. The policy implications of the study do appear to hing on the values of the feedback coefficients. If the force of credit rationing is mainly felt in the real sector, the government expenditure impact multiplier will be smaller in the disequilibrium version than in the control model. -on the other hand, if the impact of credit rationing is mainly felt in the financial sector, the opposite result will occur. However, the range of values that the multiplier may take on, depending on the impact of the credit rationing, is quite small. Thus, given the size of the error of prediction of standard models, this study concludes that it is unlikely that the inclusion of credit rationing will allow a better evaluation of government stabilization policies. This is especially true if the impact of credit rationing is believed to be in roughly the same proportion as normal expenditures in the various markets. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p> In this thesis we investigate the dynamical effect of a second generation of stellar formation in globular clusters in the context of the anomalous horizontal branch of NGC 2808. The horizontal branch of NGC 2808 is bifurcated in colour and exhibits an extended blue tail. This morphology can be explained if the blue tail stars have an enhanced helium content due to cluster self-enrichment. Specifically it has been proposed that NGC 2808 has experienced two distinct generations of star formation. The first generation has a top-heavy IMF, enhanced in 3 - 5Mo stars, and would produce many AGB stars within the first 200 Myrs of its life. The second generation then forms out of the helium-rich ejecta of the AGB stars and goes on to produce the blue tail in the horizontal branch that is currently observed in NGC 2808.</p> <p> We use three types of simulations to investigate this scenario. For a control model we run a simulation with a Salpeter IMF and a single generation. We then run models with a top-heavy IMF and a single generation and models with a top-heavy IMF and two generations. In the two generation models we also investigate the effect of concentration by examining simulations with two different length scales.</p> <p> We find that the models with the top-heavy IMF and a single generation are subject to extensive mass-loss in their early phases due to the large number of intermediate-mass stars and are less strongly affected by two-body relaxation than simulations with a Salpeter IMF. The models with two generations appear to be dynamically stable and long-lived objects, at least in their early stages. They seem to be observationally indistinguishable from single-generation clusters with Salpeter IMFs on the basis of their dynamics. The stellar populations of the two-generation clusters are found to have a much higher fraction of C-O white dwarfs than clusters with a Salpeter IMF. We find no evidence that these bodies will be preferentially scattered out of the system and they should remain part of the cluster until it dissolves after core collapse. The abundance of white dwarfs would provide an observational method of identifying two generation cluster candidates.</p> <p> Overall we find the two-generation scenario to be plausible on the basis of dynamics but due to the overabundance of white dwarfs produced by the top-heavy IMF and based on other studies of the chemistry of AGB stars we conclude that this scenario is unlikely to be the sole explanation for globular cluster self-enrichment.</p> / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

This study examines the ethical challenges that Swedish social workers may facedue to the proposed “Informationsplikt” (Duty of Disclosure). Rooted in the Tidö-Agreement between government parties and the Swedish Democrats, thisobligation mandates public officials, including social workers, to verifyindividuals legal right to reside in the country and report undocumentedimmigrants to the police. Amid widespread criticism and demonstrations againstwhat is colloquially referred to as the “Angiverilagen” (The Informer Act),professionals have voiced concerns about the potential ethical implications ofenacting this proposed legislation. Through qualitative interviews with six socialworkers, this research investigates how this proposed law as a part of bureaucraticregulations intersects with personal values and professional ethics among socialworkers. The findings reveal a conflict between the reporting obligation andsocial workers personal and professional values. Respondents express acommitment to upholding their clients’ rights and dignity, while expressingapprehension that this mandatory reporting may compromise these principles.Discussions about potential strategies, such as seeking legal loopholes withinexisting legislation or contemplating civil disobedience or resignation, shed lighton the difficulties social workers may encounter in navigating these ethicalchallenges in the future. Overall, this study underscores the tension betweenfollowing laws and regulations and the core tenets of social work ethics,emphasizing the importance of social workers navigating these complexities withintegrity and ethical reflection.

Relations among various nodes in the circuit, as captured by static and inductive invariants, have shown to have a positive impact on a wide range of EDA applications. Techniques such as boolean constraint propagation for static learning and assume-then-verify approach to reason about inductive invariants have been possible due to efficient SAT solvers. Although a significant amount of research effort has been dedicated to the development of effective invariant learning techniques over the years, the computation time for deriving powerful multi-node invariants is still a bottleneck for large circuits. Fast computation of static and inductive invariants is the primary focus of this thesis. We present a novel technique to reduce the cost of static learning by intelligently identifying redundant computations that may not yield new invariants, thereby achieving significant speedup. The process of inductive invariant reasoning relies on the assume-then-verify framework, which requires multiple iterations to complete, making it infeasible for cases with a large set of multi-node invariants. We present filtering techniques that can be applied to a diverse set of multi-node invariants to achieve a significant boost in performance of the invariant checker. Mining and reasoning about all possible potential multi-node invariants is simply infeasible. To alleviate this problem, strategies that narrow down the focus on specific types of powerful multi-node invariants are also presented. Experimental results reflect the promise of these techniques. As a measure of quality, the invariants are utilized for untestable fault identification and to constrain ATPG for path delay fault testing, with positive results. / Master of Science

With the advances in VLSI and System-On-Chip (SOC) technology, the complexity of hardware systems has increased manifold. Today, 70% of the design cost is spent in verifying these intricate systems. The two most widely used formal methods for design verification are Equivalence Checking and Model Checking. Equivalence Checking requires that the implementation circuit should be exactly equivalent to the specification circuit (golden model). In other words, for each possible input pattern, the implementation circuit should yield the same outputs as the specification circuit. Model checking, on the other hand, checks to see if the design holds certain properties, which in turn are indispensable for the proper functionality of the design. Complexities in both Equivalence Checking and Model Checking are exponential to the circuit size. In this thesis, we firstly propose a novel technique to improve SAT-based Combinational Equivalence Checking (CEC) and Bounded Model Checking (BMC). The idea is to perform a low-cost preprocessing that will statically induce global signal relationships into the original CNF formula of the circuit under verification and hence reduce the complexity of the SAT instance. This efficient and effective preprocessing quickly builds up the implication graph for the circuit under verification, yielding a large set of logic implications composed of direct, indirect and extended backward implications. These two-node implications (spanning time-frame boundaries) are converted into two-literal clauses, and added to the original CNF database. The added clauses constrain the search space of the SAT-solver engine, and provide correlation among the different variables, which enhances the Boolean Constraint Propagation (BCP). Experimental results on large and difficult ISCAS'85, ISCAS'89 (full scan) and ITC'99 (full scan) CEC instances and ISCAS'89 BMC instances show that our approach is independent of the state-of-the-art SAT-solver used, and that the added clauses help to achieve more than an order of magnitude speedup over the conventional approach. Also, comparison with Hyper-Resolution [Bacchus 03] suggests that our technique is much more powerful, yielding non-trivial clauses that significantly simplify the SAT instance complexity. Secondly, we propose a novel global learning technique that helps to identify highly non-trivial relationships among signals in the circuit netlist, thereby boosting the power of the existing implication engine. We call this new class of implications as 'extended forward implications', and show its effectiveness through additional untestable faults they help to identify. Thirdly, we propose a suite of lemmas and theorems to formalize global learning. We show through implementation that these theorems help to significantly simplify a generic CNF formula (from Formal Verification, Artificial Intelligence etc.) by identifying the necessary assignments, equivalent signals, complementary signals and other non-trivial implication relationships among its variables. We further illustrate through experimental results that the CNF formula simplification obtained using our tool outshines the simplification obtained using other preprocessors. / Master of Science

Powerful sequential optimization techniques can drastically change the Integrated Circuit (IC) design paradigm. Due to the limited capability of sequential verification tools, aggressive sequential optimization is shunned nowadays as there is no efficient way to prove the preservation of equivalence after optimization. Due to the fact that the number of transistors fitting on single fixed-size die increases with Moore's law, the problem gets harder over time and in an exponential rate. It is no surprise that functional verification becomes a major bottleneck in the time-to-market of a product. In fact, literature has reported that 70% of design time is spent on making sure the design is bug-free and operating correctly. One of the core verification tasks in achieving high quality products is equivalence checking. Essentially, equivalence checking ensures the preservation of optimized product's functionality to the unoptimized model. This is important for industry because the products are modified constantly to meet different goals such as low power, high performance, etc. The mainstream in conducting equivalence checking includes simulation and formal verification. In simulation approach, golden design and design under verification (DUV) are fed with same stimuli for input expecting outputs to produce identical responses. In case of discrepancy, traces will be generated and DUV will undergo modifications. With the increase in input pins and state elements in designs, exhaustive simulation becomes infeasible. Hence, the completeness of the approach is not guaranteed and notions of coverage has to be accompanied. On the other hand, formal verification incorporates mathematical proofs and guarantee the completeness over the search space. However, formal verification has problems of its own in which it is usually resource intensive. In addition, not all design can be verified after optimization processes. That is to say the golden model and DUV are vastly different in structure which cause modern checker to give inconclusive result. Due to this nature, this thesis focuses in improving the strength and the efficiency of sequential equivalence checking (SEC) using formal approach. While there has been great strides made in the verification for combinational circuits, SEC still remains rather rudimentary. Without powerful SEC as a backbone, aggressive sequential synthesis and optimization are often avoided if the optimized design cannot be proved to be equivalent to the original one. In an attempt to take on the challenges of SEC, we propose two frameworks that successfully determining equivalence for hard-to-verify circuits. The first framework utilizes arbitrary relations between any two nodes within the two sequential circuits in question. The two nodes can reside in the same or across the circuits; likewise, they can be from the same time-frame or across time-frames. The merit for this approach is to use global structure of the circuits to speed up the verification process. The second framework introduces techniques to identify subset but yet powerful multi-node relations (involve more than 2 nodes) which then help to prune large don't care search space and result in a successful SEC framework. In contrast with previous approaches in which exponential number of multi-node relations are mined and learned, we alleviate the computation cost by selecting much fewer invariants to achieve desired conclusion. Although independent, the two frameworks could be used in sequential to complement each other. Experimental results demonstrate that our frameworks can take on many hard-to-verify cases and show a significant speed up over previous approaches. / Master of Science

Planning is essential for an action-oriented, goal-driven software agent. In order to achieve a specific goal, an agent must first generate a plan. However, as the poet Robert Burns once noted, the best laid plans can often go awry. Each step of the plan is subject to the possibility of failure, a truth particularly relevant in the realworld or a realistic simulated environment. External influences not originally considered can often cause sudden, unanticipated consequences during the execution of the plan. When this happens, an intelligent software agent needs to answer the following important questions: What are the consequences of this event on its plan? How will the plan be affected? Can the plan be adjusted to accommodate the unanticipated effects? The research described in this thesis develops a model whereby intelligent agents can automatically determine consequences of unplanned events. Such a model provides agents with the ability to detect if and how events will affect the plan. This allows agents to subsequently modify the plan to mitigate unfavorable consequences or take advantage of favorable consequences.

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are a common health problem in all populations; however, female adolescents are at increased risk for acquiring STIs and their complications. Their increased risk of acquiring STIs is due to their behavior, anatomy. and lack of knowledge about STIs. STIs have many complications in women. Some complications include: pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy, chronic pelvic pain, and infertility. The purpose of this integrative review is to identify current sexual behaviors of female adolescents, and to find strategies at preventing or reducing STIs within this population. Nurses and other health care providers need to know the current statistics of STIs in adolescent females, and need to understand their current sexual behaviors in order to implement effective preventative strategies.