University of Massachusetts Boston
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Aging in Somerville: A Community Needs Assessment
Full text linkThis report describes research undertaken by the Center for Social & Demographic Research on Aging (CSDRA) within the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, on behalf of the City of Somerville. The goals of this project were to investigate the needs, interests, preferences, and opinions of Somerville residents age 60 or older by engaging the community regarding their experiences and needs relevant to the Council on Aging’s (COA’s) objective to identify and serve the needs of all Somerville citizens 60 and older
Redefining Community: An Analysis of Black Presence on Nantucket in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries
Full text linkIn the mid-19th century, the decline in whaling initiated massive change on Nantucket Island’s cultural landscape. The thriving, but segregated, New Guinea community that formed in the late-18th century was also impacted by this shift. Tourism ultimately became, and still is, Nantucket’s primary source of income and has wreaked havoc on the historical narrative that is perpetuated about the island. This narrative rarely moves past Nantucket’s whaling history and does not discuss the continued Black presence on the island. This thesis uncovers the relationship between race, space, and community formation that existed on Nantucket between 1860 and 1920. To do this, federal census records were mined for demographic and spatial information of Nantucket’s Black population to determine if, and how, race continued to influence the locations in which people lived and their experiences while living on Nantucket. This thesis uncovers the social and spatial fragmentation of Nantucket’s Black community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
The Cohort Space as Experienced by Latina Doctoral Students
Full text linkThis phenomenological study explores how Latina Doctoral Students experience cohort spaces within graduate programs, focusing on the gendered and racialized challenges embedded in these environments. Utilizing pláticas as a culturally grounded method and guided by a Latina Feminist Phenomenological framework, this research examines how cohort models—which are often designed to foster support and collaboration—can instead exacerbate marginalization for students at the intersections of race and gender. Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of White Space and Counterspace, the study interrogates how cohort environments can operate as sites of exclusion and surveillance, where dominant norms are reproduced and where Latina Doctoral Students must navigate constant negotiations of identity. Reflecting on their experiences in cohort-based doctoral programs, participants revealed racialized and gendered interactions that generated complex and contradictory emotional responses. They described traveling between worlds, employing strategies such as shapeshifting and camouflaging. The study findings also show how Latina doctoral students gathered intel about academic spaces, assessed their positionality, and crafted plans for survival. Central to their navigation was the creation and use of multidimensional counterspaces—spaces of resistance, affirmation, and community. This study concludes that cohort spaces frequently function as white spaces marked by limited representation and constrained agency. The implications of the study suggest that academic cohorts require intentional cultivation to foster equity and inclusion. Furthermore, counterspaces may be essential to the academic persistence and well-being of Latina doctoral students
What Students Want from Schoolwide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS): Increasing Student Voice
No full textSchoolwide Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) is a tiered framework utilized to increase positive student behaviors and decrease undesired behaviors. It is proactive and moves away from historically punitive school discipline procedures. Schools use fidelity checklists to determine if SWPBIS is well implemented, but there are no formal, quantitative means to obtain student acceptability of SWPBIS, specifically regarding Tier 1 practices. Student voice has been captured through focus groups, but a student-specific measure capturing how students feel about the SWPBIS Tier 1 practices received does not yet exist.
The Student Acceptability Measure of SWPBIS (SAM-SWPBIS) was created to incorporate student voice into SWPBIS Tier 1 planning and evaluation. Items were reviewed through two rounds of cognitive interviews with 24 students in grades three through eight and student understanding of item content was measured. Student feedback was utilized to improve item clarity. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was also conducted utilizing a sample of 215 third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students. It was determined that the student acceptability construct was well represented by SAM-SWPBIS items.
This measure offers a quantitative means to obtain student perspectives about SWPBIS. Focus group studies and interviews are limited in who can participate and can be time intensive to conduct and analyze. The SAM-SWPBIS can be efficiently used by schools to determine which implemented practices are well received by their student body and which need improvements. This is in line with Culturally Responsive SWPBIS practices, in which student voice can, and should, be amplified
SUGAR: A Sequence Unfolding Based Transformer Model for Group Activity Recognition
Full text linkLarge Language Models have improved significantly in the past couple of years due to the adoption of transformers. However, transformers still find it challenging to process videos due to limited context size caused by their quadratic computing cost. Therefore, we studied a booming field in machine learning which powers applications like social scene analysis and video surveillance systems called Group Activity Recognition (GAR). We found that recent models were able to achieve more than 90% accuracy on popular datasets like the Volleyball dataset, however, it turned out that even they relied on transformers.
Therefore, in this work, we developed a special kind of operation called Sequence Unfolding & Folding that exploits the absence of long-range dependencies in group activity dataset samples to deal with the quadratic compute cost of transformers. We employed our technique directly above all the transformer blocks in the current SOTA in GAR called Bi-Causal, and found it to become linear in performance with negligible drop in accuracy.
We also analyzed Bi-Causal behavior by replacing the vanilla multihead attention layers in all the transformer encoders with the recently introduced Lightning Attention - 2 architecture having linear performance. We found it continuously running into issues like high GPU memory usage and NaN values when used directly and hence we also developed a custom safety layer for the same
Ever Under Steam: The U.S. Revenue Cutter Service in the Spanish-American War
No full textThe United States Revenue Cutter Service played a critical yet often overlooked role during the Spanish-American War of 1898, being transformed from a maritime law‑enforcement agency into an effective naval auxiliary force. The transformation of the service from Alexander Hamilton\u27s vision of ten sailing cutters in 1790 to a modern steam-powered fleet by 1898 occurred through incremental adaptation rather than systematic reform. Beginning with administrative changes implemented by early pioneers, including N. Broughton Devereux and Sumner Increase Kimball, who professionalized the officer corps through the Revenue Cutter School of Instruction, though recruitment challenges persisted. The neutrality patrol operations during the Cuban insurrection, from 1895 to 1898, provided essential operational experience. However, they also highlighted the service\u27s limitations, with insufficient numbers of cutters to patrol thousands of miles of coastline, a lack of wireless communications, and minimal cooperation from local officials sympathetic to Cuban independence, which the service managed to address.
During the Spanish-American War, the service deployed twenty vessels and nearly 850 officers and enlisted men across two oceans, where they executed diverse missions from combat operations at Manila Bay and Cárdenas to blockade enforcement, cable protection, and support for Cuban insurgents. However, these successes came despite significant obstacles, including lingering budgetary constraints, restrictions to modernization within the fleet laid over from the earlier failed steam cutter experiments of the 1840s that created institutional resistance to technological change. Additionally, there were isolated cases of friendly fire among cutters, coupled with mechanical malfunctions, which revealed the shortcomings of the maintenance capabilities that the service managed to successfully navigate.
This study challenges existing historiography by positioning the Revenue Cutter Service not as a mere auxiliary but as an integral component of American naval strategy during the period of our nation\u27s rise as a global power. The ability of the service to shift from peacetime law enforcement to wartime naval operations, all the while preserving its unique identity, affirmed Hamilton\u27s initial concept of a dual-purpose maritime force. This was achieved despite institutional constraints and operational shortages, demonstrating the value of maintaining a versatile maritime force. These experiences directly influenced the 1915 merger of the Revenue Cutter Service with the Life-Saving Service to create the United States Coast Guard, which preserved the dual military-civilian character that originated with Hamilton\u27s vision and was fully tested in the crucible of America\u27s first overseas imperial conflict
Latinos in Massachusetts Selected Areas: Saugus
No full textEstablished in 1989, the Massachusetts Legislature created the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy in response to a need for an improved understanding of the Latino experience in the commonwealth. Now in its 34th year, the Gastón Institute continues its mission of informing the public and policymakers about issues vital to the state’s growing Latino community and providing information and analysis necessary for effective Latino participation in public policy development. To learn more about the Gastón Institute, visit: www.umb.edu/gastoninstitut
Latinos in Massachusetts Selected Areas: Lynn
No full textEstablished in 1989, the Massachusetts Legislature created the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy in response to a need for an improved understanding of the Latino experience in the commonwealth. Now in its 34th year, the Gastón Institute continues its mission of informing the public and policymakers about issues vital to the state’s growing Latino community and providing information and analysis necessary for effective Latino participation in public policy development. To learn more about the Gastón Institute, visit: www.umb.edu/gastoninstitut
Front Matter and Table of Contents
No full textFront matter and table of contents for Volume 37, Issue 2 of the New England Journal of Public Policy
Interference and Interleaving Effects in Visual Memory
No full textCognition is shaped by variations in environmental context: from the microscale sequencing of to-be-learned information, to the macroscale of long-term formal educational training. Across three studies, I assess the effect of these factors on performance in cognitive tasks. First, the fidelity of visual memory is sensitive to the temporal order and context in which to-be-remembered visual information is encoded. Such manipulations can hinder or promote learning: for example, in proactive interference, earlier-learned information impairs the ability to recall currently-relevant information. In interleaving, learning is facilitated by enabling efficient comparisons between exemplars of to-be-learned categories. I explore how these information structures affect memory by (1) measuring behavioral and pupillary dynamics associated with proactive interference and (2) replicating the interleaving effect (Kornell & Bjork, 2008) while eliminating response bias. Finally, in a meta-analysis, I investigate the magnitude of the schooling effect on children’s executive functions. Entry into formal schooling has been empirically linked to improvements on a variety of academic and cognitive measures, but the magnitude of the schooling effect on children’s executive functions is not clear. In a meta-analysis (12 studies, N ≈ 1,611), I find that schooling has a small, but robust, effect on children’s executive functions (g = 0.24, 95 % CI [0.13, 0.36]). Taken together, these findings illustrate that cognition is deeply affected by the organization of information in the environment - from moment-to-moment sequencing of information affecting memory to the large-scale organization of the learning environment shaping cognitive functions per se