This study investigated the factorial validity, stability, and social, behavioral and emotional correlates of several different roles that students can play in the context of bullying. Data were collected from students at two time points across two school years, April and May of 2006 (n=284) and again in November and December of 2006 (n=185). A confirmatory factor analysis provided evidence for the validity of 4 participant roles (i.e. bully, reinforcer, assistant, and defender). However, further analysis revealed that there was a strong degree of intercorrelation between the three bully factors (i.e., bully, reinforcer, and assistant). Analyses found that participant roles are fairly stable across school years and that the greater the percentage of same raters across the time points, the greater the stability. All of the bullying roles (i.e., bully, reinforcer, and assistant) were significantly related to callous unemotional traits, emotional dysregulation, positive expectations for aggression, conduct problems, reactive relational aggression, proactive relational aggression, reactive overt aggression, and proactive overt aggression, but these relationships were stronger in boys. It was also found that the defender role was associated with less aggression and more prosocial behavior. These associations were stronger in girls. Finally, a linear regression analysis of the interaction between participant roles and victimization revealed that at T1, the association between bullying roles and aggression was moderated by victimization. Specifically, the association was stronger in those low on victimization. At T2, the association between defending and lower aggression and greater prosocial behavior was stronger in those low in victimization.

Many organizations today are seeking to improve security by implementing multi-factor authentication, i.e. authentication requiring more than one independent mechanism to prove one's identity. One-time passwords in the form of hardware tokens in combination with conventional passwords have emerged as the predominant means in high security environments to satisfy the independent identification criteria for strong authentication. However, current popular public one-time passwords solutions such as HOTP, mOTP, TOTP, and S/Key depend on the computational complexity of breaking encryption or hash functions for security. This thesis will present an efficient and information-theoretically secure one-time password system called Shamir-OTP that is based upon secret sharing techniques.

The current study was designed to explore profiles of reactive and proactive aggression in two distinct juvenile offender populations, in a group of juvenile offenders who have been adjudicated for illegal sexual behavior (n = 138) and in a group of juvenile offenders adjudicated for general delinquent behavior (n = 243). This is the first study of its kind to investigate profiles of aggression in a population of juveniles adjudicated for illegal sexual behavior. Preliminary profile analyses indicated that the two juvenile offender populations had similar profiles of aggression overall. Two step cluster analysis results were generally consistent with previous research (Crapanzano, Frick, & Terranova, 2010; Marsee et al., 2014) with 3 groups emerging for both overt and relational aggression: a combined group high on both reactive and proactive aggression, a group high in reactive aggression alone, and a low overall group. Post hoc comparisons of the clusters revealed that the high combined group consistently demonstrated higher reports of emotional and behavioral dysfunction supporting the hypothesis that the presence of proactive aggression serves more as an indicator of severity rather than as representing a qualitatively distinct group in and of itself. Policy implications regarding sex offender registration and notification laws extended to juveniles are discussed.

The present thesis exploits a concept that lays in the core of human capital, employee satisfaction, under the context of a proactive organizational change. The prior literature depicts organizational change as a strategy applied to increase the efficiency of the company and its relevance to the market involved. The unique element of the matter is that proactive reorganizations are a product of a structural practice initiated by an entity’s human resources department. The department operates under a standardized model of change, which focuses on addressing the technical discrepancies that may occur in the human capital. Mainly analyzed from a company’s perspective, its influence on the employees involved in the change is often been neglected. The thesis was conducted in an effort to assess the need for a change in the current model in order to better address employee’s needs. To achieve that a sample of 100 Intel employees was used to uncover the state of the employees’ job satisfaction after an organizational change has been taken place. Results of the analysis exhibited above average overall satisfaction scores. The areas that employees seem to be the least satisfied were that of job security and company’s policies. Moreover, the elements of culture and the type of reorganization have also seemed to influence the overall satisfaction scores. Upon viewing the results the authors concluded that a need does exist, for a more interpersonal human resource approach to be incorporated within the current reorganizational model of an entity.

Thesis advisor: Gilda Morelli / Although trying to survive on a low income is challenging for all individuals, the experience of losing government supports can propel households into a crisis situation which may cause them to act or react in distinctive ways. This study used a survey of 78 low-income women followed by in-depth interviews with 18 of these women to explore how two groups of women--those close to losing government supports (i.e., within three months) and those further from losing government supports (i.e., experienced at least one year ago)--plan for and cope with financially vulnerable periods in their lives and how they fare as a result. There are two parts to this research. First, information on government support use, social support, proactive coping, and overall well-being were gathered using survey techniques. Linear regression and mediation analyses were conducted to further explore the association between these constructs. Proactive coping was found to be a significant predictor of well-being (R2=.305, &#946;=.552, p<.01), but social support did not mediate this relation. Findings from the survey also demonstrated the women in the near loss group scored higher on proactive coping and well-being measures, and the far from loss group scored higher on measures of social support. Second, a sub-sample of the survey participants were chosen for an in-depth interview based on when they lost (or were anticipating to lose) government supports. This sub-sample was invited to discuss their resource loss experience, how they planned for and coped with this loss, and what role other factors such as social support, consideration of future consequences, choice deferral, and perceived transaction costs played in this process and what it meant for their well-being. The conversations with the women revealed that the group near a loss situation deferred decisions less frequently and had shorter planning horizons focusing more on the immediate (and less on the future) consequences of their decisions. While the far from loss group discussed, with less urgency, their plans as being distant and spoke of their more extensive social support networks. Both groups discussed similar sentiments of shame, degradation, and inconvenience associated with their experiences at the welfare office, and although the cost of this transaction outweighed the benefit for the women in the far from loss group, the near loss participants chose to endure it to receive the assistance. This research demonstrated that individuals who face government support loss because of an increase in income and who proactively plan make better strides towards becoming economically self-sufficient and investing in the health and well-being of their families now and in the future. This, in turn, may continue to encourage and promote the ability to act in proactive ways and may lead to greater overall well-being. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

Les contraintes des marchés et les attentes de la société vis-à-vis des systèmes industriels en termes économique, sécuritaire, environnementaux requièrent de considérer les performances de ces derniers de façon globale sur l'ensemble de leur cycle de vie. Cela nécessite de mettre en synergie, par exemple avec des ingénieries couplées dès la conception, le système principal et ses systèmes contributeurs, et notamment celui de soutien avec son processus pivot de maintenance. Cette focalisation intégrative sur la maintenance a conduit à évoluer d'anciennes pratiques de maintenance vers de nouvelles plus proactives faisant émerger des stratégies prévisionnelles dont le processus clé est le pronostic. Cependant ce processus fait l'objet d'un réel manque de formalisation et les travaux existants restent principalement centrés sur les composants, sans prendre en compte les performances des systèmes. Ainsi notre contribution porte sur la proposition d'architectures génériques de pronostic système permettant d'obtenir les évolutions futures des dégradations/défaillances des composants et des performances de niveaux système/sous-systèmes/composants : soit directement par un pronostic adapté, soit par modélisation de la causalité dysfonctionnelle sous forme de relations logiques supportées par un réseau de neurones flou ANFIS. Une méthodologie est associée pour définir les indicateurs de dégradation et de performance, aboutissant à la réalisation des architectures. Enfin la faisabilité de cette approche est démontrée sur un système de déroulage/pressage de la plateforme TELMA / Today requirements and constraints on industrial systems about economic, safety, ecological points of view lead to consider their performances with a global view taking into account all the system lifecycle. Thus the design of the system-of-interest has to be connected as soon as possible with the enabling systems designs, and more particularly the logistic support based on the key process of maintenance. This new consideration about maintenance allowed to change practices from reactive to predictive ones with the emergence of the proactive maintenance built on the prognostic process. However this process still lacks of generic formalization and existing works focus mainly on component level without tackling system performances. Therefore our contribution is related to the modelling of generic architectures for the systems prognostic which assesses future evolution of degradation/failure components and system/subsystem/component level performances: either by prognosticating with an adapted model, or by modelling the dysfunctional causality with logical relations supported by a neuro-fuzzy tool ANFIS. A methodology is given to define indicators for degradations and performances and to build architecture. Finally, the feasibility of this approach is shown on the manufacturing TELMA platform

Os controles de produção e qualidade executados no canteiro de obras têm sido frequentemente associados a trâmites burocráticos, sendo limitados a tarefas administrativas, em lugar de adicionar valor para os clientes internos e externos. Por esta razão, diversas pesquisas propuseram abordagens e indicadores para a integração entre controles de produção e qualidade. Uma das abordagens apontadas na literatura como promissora consiste no uso de dispositivos móveis, para apoiar a implementação destes controles. Tais dispositivos permitem a gestão de grandes quantidades de informações, evitando retrabalhos e erros derivados da coleta manual no papel e transcrição posterior para dispositivos digitais. Outros esforços têm se focado na integração entre os modelos de processo e produto de forma que a informação possa ser utilizada de forma mais eficaz na fase de construção. Os modelos de processo são necessários para realizar o planejamento e controle da produção, enquanto os modelos do produto são relacionados a representações 2D e 3D das obras e, mais recentemente, a modelos BIM. No entanto, a literatura sobre o uso de tecnologia da informação para implementar sistemas integrados de controle da produção e da qualidade é escassa. O objetivo do presente trabalho consiste em desenvolver um modelo para a integração entre processos gerenciais, representados pelos sistemas de planejamento e controle da produção e de gestão da qualidade, e um modelo BIM do produto, buscando facilitar o acompanhamento da execução da obra, incluindo o desempenho em termos de qualidade e a ocorrência de perdas. Foram desenvolvidos dois estudos empíricos em diferentes empresas construtoras, sendo adotada a abordagem metodológica da design science research. A principal contribuição deste trabalho está relacionada à execução da integração entre os resultados de controles pró-ativos no canteiro e o modelo BIM do empreendimento de forma sistemática. Além disso, o modelo proposto tem a possibilidade de ser adaptado para usos diversos, podendo, assim, incorporar informações correspondentes a outras fases do ciclo de vida dos empreendimentos construtivos. / Production and quality controls undertaken in construction sites have often been associated to bureaucratic procedures, being limited to simple administrative tasks, instead of adding value for internal and external stakeholders. For that reason, some research studies have proposed approaches and indicators for the integration of production and quality controls. One of these approaches pointed out in the literature is the use of mobile devices, to support the implementation of those controls. Those devices allow the management of large information batches, reducing rework and errors derived from manual paper-based data collection and further transcription to digital media. Other efforts have focused on the integration between product and process models so that information can be more effectively used during the construction phase of the project. Process models are necessary for carrying out production planning and control, while product models are concerned with 2D or 3D design, and, most recently, with BIM models. Nonetheless, the literature on the use of information technology for implementing integrated production and quality control is scarce. The aim of this research work is to develop a model for the integration of management processes, composed by production planning, control and quality management processes, and a BIM product model, in order to facilitate the monitoring of project execution, including the performance in terms of quality and the occurrence of waste. Two empirical studies were carried out in different construction companies, using the design science research approach. The main contributions of this investigation are related to the integration between some proactive control results and the BIM model in a systematic way. Furthermore, the proposed model has the possibility to be adapted for diverse uses, such as incorporating information from different phases of the construction project life cycle.

The economic cost of financial statement fraud continues to be a problem for organizations and society. The research problem addressed in this study was the limited risk management strategies available for the early detection and prevention of financial statement fraud by corporate managers and auditors. These strategies are important to the proactive prevention of fraud. This study is important to future trustworthiness of financial statements. The purpose of this qualitative, multiple-case study was to explore current early detection and prevention methods in financial statement fraud using a risk management conceptual framework. The research question focused on current fraud detection and prevention policies and risk management strategies that are currently used for proactively detecting and preventing financial statement fraud. Multiple sources of information were used, including examining recent financial fraud scandals, interviews, documents, and past research. The target population was managers and auditors of publicly traded corporations. A purposive sampling procedure was used to select 23 participants, which provided rich data. The qualitative data was coded and analyzed using the concept of risk management, along with triangulation to ensure credibility. The key findings indicated that current practitioners are moving beyond the era of reactive measures born from the past fraud crises and are working toward improved financial statement quality and trust. The results of the study also indicated that future research should include proactive methods of preventing fraud. This study is socially significant because it could enhance the ability to trust financial statement reporting in the future and improve corporate reputations.

Detecting and interpreting sensory events, and remembering those events in in the service of future actions, forms the foundation of all behavior. Each of these pillars of the so-called "perception-action cycle" have been topics of extensive inquiry throughout recorded history, with philosophical foundations provided by early BCE and CE periods (especially during the Classic and Renaissance eras) leading to intensive empirical study in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such experiments have described detailed (but incomplete) behavioral functions reflecting perception and memory, and have begun to unravel the extraordinarily complex substrates of these functions in the nervous system. The current dissertation was motivated by these findings, with the goal of meaningfully extending our understanding of such processes through a multi-experiment approach spanning the behavioral and neurophysiological levels. The focus of these experiments is on short-term memory (STM), though as we shall see, STM is ultimately inseparable from sensory perception and is directly or indirectly associated with guidance of motor responses. It thus provides a nexus between the sensory inputs and motor outputs that describe interactions between the organism and environment. In Chapter 2, previous findings from nonhuman primate literature describing relatively poor performance for auditory compared to visual or tactile STM inspired similar comparisons among modalities in humans. In both STM and recognition memory paradigms, accuracy is shown to be lowest for the auditory modality, suggesting commonalities among primate species. Chapters 3-5 examined STM processing in nonhuman primates at the behavioral and neurophysiological levels. In Chapter 3, a systematic investigation of memory errors produced by recycling memoranda across trials (proactive interference) is provided for the understudied auditory modality in monkeys. Such errors were ameliorated (but not completely eliminated) by increasing the proportions of unique memoranda presented within a session, and by separating successive trials by greater time intervals. In Chapter 4, previous results revealing a human memory advantage for audiovisual events (compared to unimodal auditory or visual events) inspired a similar comparison in monkeys using a concurrent auditory, visual, and audiovisual STM task. Here, the primary results conformed to a priori expectations, with superior performance observed on audiovisual trials compared to either unimodal trial type. Surprisingly, two of three subjects exhibited superior unimodal performance on auditory trials. This result contrasts with previous results in nonhuman primates, but can be interpreted in light of these subjects' extensive prior experience with unimodal auditory STM tasks. In Chapter 5, the same subjects performed the concurrent audiovisual STM task while activity of single cells and local cell populations was recorded within prefrontal cortex (PFC), a region known to exhibit multisensory integrative and memory functions. The results indicate that both of these functions converge within PFC, down to the level of individual cells, as evidenced by audiovisual integrative responses within mnemonic processes such as delay-related changes in activity and detection of repeated versus different sensory cues. Further, a disproportionate number of the recorded units exhibited such mnemonic processes on audiovisual trials, a finding that corresponds to the superior behavioral performance on these trials. Taken together, these findings reinforce the important role of PFC in STM and multisensory integration. They further strengthen the evidence that "memory" is not a unitary phenomenon, but can be seen as the outcome of processing within and among multiple subsystems, with substantial areas of overlap and separation across modalities. Finally, cross-species comparisons reveal substantial similarities in memory processing between humans and nonhuman primates, suggesting shared evolutionary heritage of systems underlying the perception-action cycle.

Depuis le début des années 1990, l'utilisation des agents mobiles dans le cadre de l'administration système et réseau est étudiée. Des plates-formes à agents mobiles répondant à cet usage ont été développées et se sont penchées en général sur les problèmes de l'interrogation des équipements actifs du réseau, de la supervision des noeuds des plates-formes, de la sécurité des noeuds visités, etc. Cependant, une contrainte opérationnelle provenant du fait que la présence d'éléments dans un réseau tend à évoluer dynamiquement n'avait pas été prise en compte. Une telle évolution requiert que les itinéraires de migration associés aux agents mobiles d'administration ne soient pas définis comme cela est fait en général, de manière statique par l'administrateur, mais qu'au contraire de tels itinéraires puissent être construits à la volée de sorte à refléter la topologie courante du réseau à administrer. Nous avons aussi constaté que les facilités de programmation obtenues par l'association d'une fonction d'administration à chacun des éléments d'un itinéraire, et ce, en fonction du type de l'élément, pourraient être bénéfique, en ce sens que cela pourrait grandement simplifier la définition d'agents mettant en oeuvre de nouvelles fonctions d'administration système et réseau.<br />Ce travail de thèse consiste à proposer la définition d'un mécanisme de fabrication puis d'utilisation d'itinéraires dynamiques pour l'administration système et réseau. Nous validons cette définition en fournissant une plate-forme complète ainsi qu'un cadre de programmation d'agents mobiles d'administration système et réseau. Pour ce faire, nous utilisons et étendons la bibliothèque ProActive pour le calcul parallèle, réparti et mobile. En effet, ProActive offre un cadre qui simplifie grandement la programmation et le déploiement d'agents mobiles en<br />environnement hétérogène et réparti. Le mécanisme d'itinéraires proposé suppose la connaissance de la topologie du réseau et des éléments qui y sont connectés. Nous implantons donc un mécanisme de découverte automatique de la topologie d'un réseau au niveau 2 OSI. Nous définissons ensuite un cadre générique de programmation d'agents mobiles bâtie autour de notre mécanisme d'itinéraires pour effectuer des tâches d'administration système et réseau. Pour valider notre approche et son intégration dans le monde de l'administration système et réseau, nous fournissons des exemples concrets de l'utilisation des agents mobiles d'administration et ce pour une large gamme de configurations réseau.