Research on adolescents sense of belonging in schools is plentiful; however, there is an obvious lack of research conducted in early childhood years. Friendship groups have been shown to be impactful in helping students feel like they belong in school. This study explores how kindergarteners talk about friendship in the context of belonging in a two-way immersion school. I pay particular attention to the role primary language plays in developing a sense of belonging and friendships at school. The 19 kindergarteners in this study were interviewed in small linguistically homogenous groups of 2 or 3 students. Each focus group was shown 2 puppets that represented one English-speaking and one Spanish-speaking child. Students were then asked to help each puppet understand what it would be like to be a new student at the school and what they would need to know to fit in. Findings reveal that these students recognize the utility of language for doing schoolwork and fitting into the institution of schooling, but did not highlight the importance of language as a necessary tool for making friends. Students focus on the importance of understanding the social context in order to belong at school. More research is needed regarding how school programs and social context influence the development of friendship.

Anomaly event detection has become increasingly important and is of great significance for real-time monitoring systems. However, developing a reliable anomaly detection and localization model still requires overcoming many challenging problems considering the ambiguity in the definition of an abnormal event and the lack of ground truth datasets for training. In this thesis, we propose a Two-way Multi-input Generative Neural Network (TMGNN), which is an unsupervised anomaly events detection and localization method based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). TMGNN is composed of two neural networks, an appearance generation neural network and a motion generation neural network. These two networks are trained on normal frames and their corresponding motion and mosaic frames respectively. In the testing steps, the trained model cannot properly reconstruct the anomalous objects since the network is trained only on normal frames and has not learned patterns of anomalous cases. With the help of our new patch-based evaluation method, we utilize the reconstruction error to detect and localize possible anomalous objects. Our experiments show that on the UCSD Pedestrain2 dataset, our approach achieves 96.5% Area Under Curve (AUC) and 94.1% AUC for the frame-level and pixel-level criteria, respectively, reaching the best classification results compared to other traditional and deep learning methods. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc) / Recently, abnormal event detection has attracted increasing attention in the field of surveillance video. However, it is still a big challenge to build an automatic and reliable abnormal event detection system to review a surveillance video containing hundreds of frames and mask the frames with abnormal objects or events. In this thesis, we build a model and teach it to memorize the structure of normal frames. Then the model is able to tell which frames are normal. Any other frames that appear in the surveillance video will be classified as abnormal frames. Moreover, we design a new method to evaluate the performance of our model and compare it with other models’ results.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Jon Wargo / This research study investigates how young Brazilian immigrant students (ages 5-9) experience their education in a Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program (Portuguese-English) at one elementary school in the U.S. Northeast. TWI is a bilingual education model that has become popular in recent years but has also come under scrutiny with growing concerns for equity. This multi-year ethnographic study examined students’ roles as thinkers and knowers who contribute to the social world of schooling in a bilingual program that was originally envisioned to serve their needs. Data sources are: participant observations in classrooms and schoolwide and program-specific meetings; interviews with school staff members, children, and caregivers; and a collection of in-class assignments.Findings from this study point to the paradoxical relationship that the focal school had with young immigrant children. First, children of Brazilian descent contributed to the successful implementation and survival of the new bilingual strand in their school through daily language practices and by leveraging their lived experiences and memories during instruction. Second, Brazilian immigrant students carved out spaces in their TWI classrooms to deploy and co-construct subalternized knowledges based on their transborder experiences. At the same time, they faced conflicting orientations concerning their role and participation in the TWI program as well as dynamics of in/visibility. Third, following these students at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, during fully remote learning, revealed how the children negotiated compounded constraints. I show how young students humanized their virtual TWI classrooms, made space for playfulness, and centered their care-full lives in their formal schooling during remote learning. Investigating the educational realities of Brazilians, a rapidly growing but understudied segment of the U.S. Latinx population, not only sheds light on unique facets of their experience, but also generates insights as to how to (re)think educational models, programs, and responses to minoritized populations in the U.S. Precisely, together, the findings advocate for a holistic focus on childhoods, as opposed to the current emphasis on language-as-subject, in TWI education. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

An Eulerian-Eulerian model for dilute gas-particle turbulent flows is developed for engineering applications. The aim is to understand the effect of particles on turbulent flows. The model is implemented in a finite element code which is used to perform numerical simulations. The feedback from the particles on the turbulence and the mean flow of the gas in a vertical channel flow is studied. In particular, the influence of the particle response time and particle volume fraction on the preferential concentration of the particles near the walls, caused by the turbophoretic effect is explored. The study shows that the particle feedback decreases the accumulation of particles on the walls. It is also found that even a low particle volume fraction can have a significant impact on the turbulence and the mean flow of the gas. A model for the particle fluctuating velocity in turbulent gas-particle flow is derived using a set of stochastic differential equations. Particle-particle collisions were taken into account. The model shows that the particle fluctuating velocity increases with increasing particle-particle collisions and that increasing particle response times decrease the fluctuating velocity. / QC 20101124

<p>The increased public safety concerns to the consequences of deliberate and accidental explosions have led to the development of the Canadian (CSA S850- 12) and American (ASCE 59-11) blast standards. There is an urgent need to investigate and quantify the response of structural components under such extreme loading conditions. This is especially important for masonry components, where research has been limited due to the misconception that masonry (both reinforced and unreinforced) is an inadequate material for blast hardening applications. The standards allow the use of experimental testing or dynamic analysis in order to determine peak responses and evaluate them in terms of the code prescribed performance limits and accompanying levels of damage. The current study investigates the response of non-integral and non-participating infill walls designed to undergo two-way out-of-plane response and detailed to fail in flexure under static loading conditions. Through experimental blast testing and dynamic model validation of reduced-scale walls under a range of design-basis threat (DBT) levels, this study shows that reinforced masonry is a viable alternative for blast protection. However, the current flexural-based code requirements, thought to be conservative, may be inadequate at loads of higher impulse where shear damage is prevalent. This study also shows the influence that changing the boundary configuration and level of reinforcement has on the peak response, where the performance limits of the current codes makes no provisions for these parameters.</p> / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

In recent years, the indoor positioning system (IPS) has attracted significant interests in both academical research and industrial development. It has seen many applications, such as hostage search and rescue, indoor navigation, and warehouse management, all of which can take advantage of precise positioning. However, in indoor environments, traditional methods, like the Global Positioning System (GPS), are usually either unreliable or incorrect because of the complicated physical characteristics of various objects reflecting and dispersing signals, such as the presence of people, walls, obstructions, and furniture. In contrast to other technologies such as WiFi and Bluetooth, which are not suitable to extract accurate timing information, UWB technology has the potential to reach center-meter level accuracy in indoor positioning. In this thesis, we developed a real-time, low-cost, IPS based on commercial-off-the-shelf UWB transceivers. Both the Two Way Ranging (TWR) and Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) approaches have been implemented to obtain a target's location. To alleviate the effect of multipath propagation, we detect the presence of outliers by comparing the first path signal level and estimated receiving signal level. Moreover, we have designed the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) and evaluated performance by deploying the system both in a lab environment and in a two-story historical building during the 2018 Microsoft Indoor Localization Competition. The results show that we achieve a 28.9cm 95%-quantile 2D tracking error in the lab environment and a 92cm average tracking error for 3D localization on the Microsoft Indoor Localization Competition site. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

Yes / This paper investigates whether bond, issuer, industry and macro-specific variables account for the observed variation of credit spreads’ changes of global shipping bond issues before and after the onset of the subprime financial crisis. Results show that conclusions as to the significant variables of spreads depend significantly on whether two-way clusteradjusted standard errors are utilized, thus rendering results in the extant literature ambigious. The main determinants of global cargo-carrying companies’ shipping bond spreads are found in this paper to be: the liquidity of the bond issue, the stock market’s volatility, the bond market’s cyclicality, freight earnings and the credit rating of the bond issue.

In this thesis, three websites are explored in-depth and serve as a case study for an intercultural comparison of websites as public relations tools. The websites of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPDB), and Citibank were evaluated for this specific study because they represent three models of current banks operating in a culturally-evolving Chinese society. The two-way symmetrical model of public relations and the personal influence model have provided basic framework for this thesis. To establish the two-way symmetrical public relations via the website, these three banks employ different public relations strategies due to the different organizational structure and operating systems. In addition, culture has played an important role for banks to build relationships with their various publics. Specifically, Confucian ideology, the foundation for Chinese culture, provides insights for this thesis. To cater to the publics, ICBC adhered more strictly to Chinese culture norms, while SPDB's website is a reflection of a hybrid of Western and Chinese culture. Moreover, although Citibank does not make many efforts to culturally cater to its Chinese publics, Citibank successfully built its reputation and image through building a business-oriented and expert website. / Master of Arts