<p>This is a study of parenting and child development in a slum area in a developing part of the world. The aims of the study were threefold. The first aim was to explore the physical and social contexts for parenting in a shantytown in Rio de Janeiro using an ecological perspective. The second aim was to examine parenting and subsequent child outcomes among a sample of families living in the shantytown. The third aim was to explore what factors contribute to differences among parents in how they nurture and protect their children. The theoretical framework of the study was an updated version of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development. Using self-report questionnaires developed by Rohner, data on perceived parental acceptance–rejection were collected from 72 families with adolescents 12–14 years old, representing approx. 75% of all households with children in this age group in the shantytown. Besides self-report questionnaires, each adolescent’s main caregiver replied to several standardized questionnaires developed by Garbarino et al., eliciting demographic and social-situational data about the family, neighborhood, and wider community. The results of the study paint a complex portrait of the social living conditions of the parents and children. Despite many difficulties, most parents seemed to raise their children with loving care. The results from the self-report questionnaires indicate that the majority of the adolescents perceived substantial parental acceptance. The adolescents’ experience of greater or lesser parental acceptance–rejection seems to influence their emotional and behavioral functioning; it also seems to be related to their school attendance. Much of the variation in degree of perceived acceptance–rejection seems to be related both to characteristics of the individual adolescents and their main caregiver(s) and to influences from the social and environmental context in which they and their caregivers interact and live their lives.</p>

This thesis is on quantum algorithms. It has three main themes: (1) quantum walk based search algorithms, (2) quantum rejection sampling, and (3) the Boolean function hidden shift problem. The first two parts deal with generic techniques for constructing quantum algorithms, and the last part is on quantum algorithms for a specific algebraic problem. In the first part of this thesis we show how certain types of random walk search algorithms can be transformed into quantum algorithms that search quadratically faster. More formally, given a random walk on a graph with an unknown set of marked vertices, we construct a quantum walk that finds a marked vertex in a number of steps that is quadratically smaller than the hitting time of the random walk. The main idea of our approach is to interpolate the random walk from one that does not stop when a marked vertex is found to one that stops. The quantum equivalent of this procedure drives the initial superposition over all vertices to a superposition over marked vertices. We present an adiabatic as well as a circuit version of our algorithm, and apply it to the spatial search problem on the 2D grid. In the second part we study a quantum version of the problem of resampling one probability distribution to another. More formally, given query access to a black box that produces a coherent superposition of unknown quantum states with given amplitudes, the problem is to prepare a coherent superposition of the same states with different specified amplitudes. Our main result is a tight characterization of the number of queries needed for this transformation. By utilizing the symmetries of the problem, we prove a lower bound using a hybrid argument and semidefinite programming. For the matching upper bound we construct a quantum algorithm that generalizes the rejection sampling method first formalized by von~Neumann in~1951. We describe quantum algorithms for the linear equations problem and quantum Metropolis sampling as applications of quantum rejection sampling. In the third part we consider a hidden shift problem for Boolean functions: given oracle access to f(x+s), where f(x) is a known Boolean function, determine the hidden shift s. We construct quantum algorithms for this problem using the "pretty good measurement" and quantum rejection sampling. Both algorithms use the Fourier transform and their complexity can be expressed in terms of the Fourier spectrum of f (in particular, in the second case it relates to "water-filling" of the spectrum). We also construct algorithms for variations of this problem where the task is to verify a given shift or extract only a single bit of information about it.

CD4+CD25+Foxp3+ T regulatory (Treg) cells are critical in maintaining self tolerance and promoting the acceptance of allogeneic tissue/organ grafts. To be widely applied in clinical settings, there needs to be a readily available source of Treg cells, a requirement that is better met if non-histocompatible donor cells could be utilized in adoptive therapy. Therefore, to investigate the therapeutic potential of fully allogeneic Treg cells to control autoimmune disease or allograft rejection, we utilized IL-2R beta-deficient mice that exhibit rapid lethal autoimmunity due to low production of an ineffective population of Treg cells. We show that adoptive transfer of MHC-mismatched Treg cells into IL-2R beta-/- mice resulted in life-long engraftment of the donor cells, which exhibited skewed reactivity toward host alloantigens, and prevented autoimmunity. When such animals received skin grafts, they exhibited tolerance to those grafts that expressed MHC molecules from which the donor Treg cells were derived. Collectively, these data provide proof-of-principle that effective engraftment by allogeneic Treg cells controls autoimmunity and leads to favorable conditions for long-term acceptance of allografts. Current data indicates that CD4+CD25+Foxp3+ Treg cells exhibit a broad TCR repertoire. However, the relationship between this diversity and capacity to control a similarly diverse population of potentially autoreactive T cells remains to be defined. To investigate this issue, we assessed the TCR repertoire of chimeric donor Treg cells in IL-2R beta-/- mice that were adoptively treated with a diverse polyclonal Treg inoculums. We demonstrate that autoimmune disease was fully prevented by engrafted donor Treg cells in spite of a TCR repertoire that is less diverse than the input cells. However, in settings where the input TCR repertoire is limited by utilizing donor Treg cells that express a single TCR beta chain, control of disease was hampered, correlating with a limited TCR alpha repertoire within the engrafting donor Treg cells. Collectively, these findings suggest that for adoptive therapy, a diverse TCR repertoire of input Treg cell inoculums is an essential requirement for effective control of polyclonal autoreactive T cells but perturbations in the repertoire that results in significant limitation to this diversity may compromise Treg cell efficacy at fully keeping autoaggressive cells in check.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

¡@¡@Owing to the entry into WTO, which requires an open insurance market, and the legislation of the six ¡§Financial Holding Company Acts¡¨ that allows cross deals across different financial sections and multi-channeled selling, Taiwan¡¦s insurance market, of which the ratio of life insurance arrived at 182% in 2006, is squeezing the marketing space of the local life insurance agents, frustrating and driving them away. ¡@¡@This research aims primarily to investigate the relationships of the specific personality traits of a life insurance agent, his/her attributional style of rejection and selling performance, and hopefully to offer tools in selecting potential life insurance agents. At the same time, this research hopes to render stimulating, training and helpful devices for the practicing agents of various types of personality. ¡@¡@The measurement scales in this research paper consist of five questionnaires about personality traits and attributional style of rejection, and the voluntary participants are agents working for a life insurance company of which annual performance is among the top five, according to the database of the Taiwan Insurance Institute, while collecting their annual performance data as the dependent variable. Three hundred copies of the questionnaires are distributed and there are 125 effective copies returned, at a ratio of 42%. The statistical approaches applied are correlation analysis and regression analysis in support of the hypothesis. ¡@¡@By correlation analysis and regression analysis, the conclusions reached are: 1, The extroversion construction in the ¡§Five-Factor of Personality Traits¡¨ interacts positively with the policy sale and the first-year premium collection, which reaches the level of significance. It shows that the better an agent¡¦s extroversion construction is, the better performance of his/her policy sale and first-year premium collection will be. 2, The stability of an agent¡¦s attributional style of rejection interacts negatively with his/her policy sale and first-year premium collection, which reaches the level of significance. It shows that the more stable an agent¡¦s attributional style of rejection is, which means he/she takes the rejection of the client as something normal, the worse performance of his/her policy sale and first-year premium collection will be. ¡@¡@The managerial implications and the following researching suggestions are also discussed in this research paper. Key words: The Five-Factor of Personality Traits, the Attributional Style of Rejection,Performance

No description available.

In a roll-to-roll web system lateral motion of a web caused by disturbances, which are often periodic, results in poor product quality. To reduce the effect of such disturbances, two control strategies are applied. First, the internal model principle is used to reject a sinusoidal disturbance. Second, repetitive control theory is used to reject a general periodic disturbance. We provide the synthesis procedure for both strategies, and demonstrate its use in several simulation studies on a five-roller web system. The simulation results show that the effect of disturbances, either sinusoidal or triangular, on lateral motion are significantly reduced with the internal model controller or the modified repetitive controller.

The theory of rejection sensitivity, suggests that early experiences of rejection (e.g. parental rejection, peer rejection) can result in the tendency to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and overreact to rejection by significant others in future relationships. An abundance of quantitative research has suggested that rejection sensitivity has significant implications regarding one’s thoughts and actions within intimate partnerships (e.g. Downey & Feldman, 1996); however, little is known about the lived experience of the women who are sensitive to rejection. The present research sought to move beyond the developmental perspective of the theory of rejection sensitivity (as presented in the first two chapters) by aiming to gain an understanding of how women experience rejection sensitivity within their intimate partnerships and how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours have impacted their romantic lives. Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to explore the lived experience of women who identified with rejection sensitivity. Data generated during two interviews with three participants was transcribed and analyzed using an interpretive phenomenological analysis approach. An over-arching theme of I won’t let it happen again: a journey of self-protection emerged that was representative of the women’s shared experience of protecting themselves from experiencing further rejection in their romantic relationships and was further illustrated throughout three secondary themes: I can control things so I won’t let it happen again, Wait…is it happening anyway?, and A continuous journey. Based on the present findings, considerations for further research and practice are offered. Given lack of research aimed at understanding the experiences of women who identify with rejection sensitivity, the value of the present study is twofold: This research makes a notable contribution to current literature, but also encourages women, and those devoted to helping them, to understand their own unique relationships with rejection sensitivity and navigate their own journeys with a sense of hope for mutually satisfying and beneficial romantic relationships in their futures.

This master thesis investigates the performance of a car navigation system using lateral accelerometers, yaw rate and bearings relative three known radio beacons. Accelerometer, gyroscope and position data has been collected by an IMU combined with a GPS receiver, where the IMU was installed in the approximate motion center of a car. The bearing measurements are simulated using GPS data and the measurement noise model is derived from an experiment where the direction of arrival to one transmitter was estimated by an antenna array and the signal processing algorithm MUSIC. The measurements are fused in a multi-rate extended Kalman filter which assumes that all measurement noise is Gaussian distributed. This is not the case for the bearing measurement noise which contains outliers and therefore is modelled as a Gaussian uniform noise mixture. Different methods to deal with this have been investigated where the main focus is on the principle to use the Kalman filter’s innovation for each bearing measurement as an indication of its quality and discarding measurements with a quality above a certain threshold.

The "Ahrens method" is a very simple method for sampling from univariate distributions. It is based on rejection from piecewise constant hat functions. It can be applied analogously to the multivariate case where hat functions are used that are constant on rectangular domains. In this paper we investigate the case of distributions with so called orthounimodal densities. Technical implementation details as well as their practical limitations are discussed. The application to more general distributions is considered. (author's abstract) / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics