Throughout the early 20th century, eugenics discourse came to colour many facets of social policy making across Canada. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the ways by which eugenics and the mental hygiene movement impacted the practice of child protection during the early 20th century. I argue that the construction and propagation of the term and classification of ‘feeble-mindedness’ was used by child protection workers to exclude an increasing number of children from both care and society. During this period, social workers were complicit in the sorting, classifying and segregating of children deemed ‘feeble-minded’ with the expressed purpose of eradicating certain classes of people from society and moreover the gene pool. Women shouldered the burden of the social reform movement, as they were considered both the solution to, and the cause, of social ills. Controlling women’s reproduction was seen as the best way to ensure ‘race betterment’. Women at the intersection of race, class and ability were often constructed as ‘feeble-minded’ and segregated for fear that they would reproduce ‘their kind’. Initially, the child protection system blatantly excluded those deemed ‘unworthy’ or ‘unreformable’. Under the rubric of eugenics, however, child protection’s role shifted and the system became complicit in the application of eugenic principle to child and family life and women’s reproduction under the auspice of ‘race betterment’ and nation building. Through this exploratory study, it is evident that the normative structures of child protection policy remain unchanged. Extricating children from troubled environments at the least possible cost continues to trump a more insightful look at how policy and resources should engage with structural concerns, such as poverty. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

Research supports the notion that sexual and physical assault history is associated with the use of self-protective strategies. One shortcoming in this area of research is the reliance on dichotomous (yes-no) measures of assault as opposed to number of experiences. The aim of this study was to determine if the number of sexual and physical assaults experienced is associated with self-protection behaviors, controlling for general safety concerns. Women (N = 293) completed measures of sexual and physical assault, self-protective behaviors, fear, and safety concerns using a web based survey. Contrary to expectations, sexual and physical assault (and the interactive effect of these variables) were not related to self-protective behaviors. However, safety concerns and overall fear were positively associated with the use of self-protective behaviors. These findings have implications for the creation of interventions aimed at victims of crime.

Todays protection schemes for shipboard applications, such as the zone-based differential protection, are efficient, fast, and reliable for fault detection. However, these protection schemes do not consider the system stability or power balance problems that occur with fault isolation and the system reconfiguration. This thesis focuses on developing the extended protection function including the fast reconfiguration function that intends to maintain the power balance of the unfaulted subsystem. Graph theory is utilized to represent the shipboard power system topology in matrices, and matrix operations are developed to represent the corresponding power system topology change and evaluate the outcome of the fault. Intelligent search algorithms are implemented to find the possible system configuration after fault isolation with balanced power generation and load through merging possible connected systems and priority-based load shedding. The algorithms are successfully implemented in MATLAB miles and tested on various shipboard power system configurations and fault scenarios.

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No description available.

The south Brevard coast of Florida is a major nesting ground for the Atlantic loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta). A beach restoration project was completed in the winter of 1980-81 at Indialantic and Melbourne Beach. A study was conducted to investigate the effects of beach restoration on marine turtle nesting during the summer months of 1981 and 1982. A 3.1 km restored beach study area and two control beach study areas, each 3.1 km in length and consisting of natural beach sands, were established. The entire study area (9.3 km) was monitored for nesting and non-nesting emergences (false crawls) and a tagging program was established. The objectives of the study were to determine the effects of the restoration project on the nesting behavior of adult female turtles, and to develop an understanding of the effects of restored beach sands on the survival of marine turtle eggs and hatchlings. During the 1981 nesting season 2,766 marine turtle emergences were recorded. The nesting success rates (nesting emergences/total emergences x 100) for 1981 on the north control beach and the south control beach were 54% and 51% respectively, whereas the restored beach had a statistically significant lower nesting success of 28%. This reduction of nesting success was attributed to a compact substrate that was markedly less friable than the sands of the control beaches. In 1981, the turtles emerging to nest in the restored area often displayed aberrant digging behavior when they encountered the compact sand. By the following summer of 1982, it was evident that the restored beach substrate was less compact. The nesting success for 1982 in the restored beach (46%) rose to a level equal to that of the control beaches (48% and 46%). A total of 3,144 marine turtle emergences were recorded in the 1982 nesting season. To study the effects of beach restoration on the eggs and hatchlings, nests were marked, left to incubate on the beach, and later excavated to determine hatch success. Hatch data and hatchling emergence data were collected on 30 clutches in each of the three beach sections for both the 1981 and 1982 seasons. No significant difference was found between the hatch percentage for the restored beach and the hatch percentages for the control beaches in either study year. The hatchling emergence data, which would indicate the hatchlings' ability to emerge from the sand, indicate no significant difference between the restored beach and control beaches for 1981 and 1982.

Yes / In 2004, the author carried out a small scale study to find out the views of those living and working in private care homes in England about a range of issues connected to inspection, regulation and ways to better protect older people. This study reports on views from nineteen managers and nineteen residents about their understanding of abuse, their perceptions of the different forms of abuse and the possible action to deal with offending care staff. Although there was some consensus about the seriousness of certain types of abuse and how managers would investigate the allegation, the findings indicate that mandatory training for registered care home owners and managers is necessary to clarify their responsibilities in relation to their actions and reporting of certain offences to relevant agencies.

Noise-induced hearing loss and tinnitus are the two most prevalent service-connected disabilities for veterans receiving compensation (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2010). While it is possible to protect against noise-induced hearing damage with hearing protection devices (HPDs) and hearing protection enhancement devices (HPEDs), military personnel resist using HPDs/HPEDs that compromise their situational awareness, including ability to localize enemy gunfire. Manufacturers of a new generation of "pass-through" level-dependent HPEDs claim these devices preserve normal or near-normal hearing. A research study was conducted to evaluate localization of suprathreshold gunshot's report (from blank ammunition) with one passive (3M's Single-Ended Combat Arms earplug) and three electronic level-dependent HPEDs (Peltor's Com-Tac II electronic earmuffs and Etymotic's EB 1 and EB 15 High-Fidelity Electronic BlastPLG earplugs), in comparison to the open ear in an in-field test environment with ambient outdoor noise and in 82 dBA diesel truck noise with nine normal and four impaired hearing participants. Statistical analysis showed worse localization accuracy and response time with the Com-Tac II earmuffs than with the other tested HPEDs. Performance with all HPEDs was worse than that with the open ear, except on right-left confusions, in which the Com-Tac II stood alone as worst, and in response time, for which the EB 1 earplug was equivalent to the open ear. There was no significant main effect of noise level. There was generally no significant effect of hearing ability. However, participants with impaired hearing had more right-left confusions than those with normal hearing. Subjective ratings related to localization generally corroborated objective localization performance. Three follow-up experiments were performed: (1) an assessment of the effect of microphone position on localization with the EB 15, which showed a limited advantage when the microphone was positioned near the opening of the ear canal compared to when it was facing outwards; (2) an assessment of Etymotic's QuickSIN test as a predictor localization performance, which showed little correlation with localization performance; and (3) an assessment of the acoustic properties of the experiment site, which was inconclusive with regards to the direction of dominant sound energy from gunshots from each of the shooter positions. / Ph. D.

A field-implementable measure is needed to estimate the attenuation workers are achieving with their hearing protectors in the field. Alternative measures for assessing a hearing protector's effectiveness were evaluated through comparison to the standardized real-ear attenuation at threshold (REAT) method, termed 1I3-REAT, a psychophysical procedure (ANSI S3.19-1984). One alternative deviated from the standardized procedure primarily through utilizing a pure-tone audiometer coupled to an amplifier and loudspeaker for the sound field presentation of pure tones (Pr -REAT). The other alternative. tenned microphone in real-ear (MIRE), used miniature microphones in each concha and just outside of each of the subject's two ears to physically measure the attenuation of the protector using both insertion loss (lL-MIRE) and noise reduction (NR-MIRE) procedures. Comparisons between the alternative measures were made across nine 113 octave bands centered at 125, 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 3150,4000, 6300, and 8000 Hz. The experiment also explored a means for predicting broadband attenuation from data of a single 113 octave band through a regression analysis for both PT -REAT tests and NR-MIRE tests. Results showed that when comparing the PT -REAT test and the standardized 1/3-REA T method, the standardized method exhibited significantly greater attenuation at most of the 1/3 octave bands tested. The difference, however, may be due to the higher ambient noise levels present in the pure tone condition. The MIRE measures also showed some significant differences with the standardized 1/3-REAT method for the values collapsed across protectors, with the direction of the difference changing with test band. At 125 Hz, the MIRE metrics yielded significantly lower attenuation, while from 500 to 6300 Hz, the 1/3-REAT method generally yielded significantly lower attenuation. These differences may be due in part to the occlusion effect and the bone conduction of sound. In general, however, the size and consistency of the differences across hearing protection devices (HPDs) suggest that PT-REAT and MIRE measures hold promise for providing quick and relatively accurate estimations of an HPD's attenuation in the field. Results of the regression analyses indicated that single test band data obtained at 250 and 500 Hz, from both PT-REAT and NR-MIRE metrics, provided the best predictions for the hearing protectors tested in this study, based on their Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients. / Ph. D.