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Considering What Counts: Inside United States Child Maltreatment Statistics
No full textThe counting process which produces statistics is a human enterprise that reflects the needs and interests of the counters. This is clear in the case of the social problem of child abuse. Many different social groups and subprofessions are located in government bureaucracies organized to protect children and preserve families. Official statistics about how many children are abused (officially “maltreated”) vary markedly among the different states. The magnitude of the disparities among jurisdictions cannot be explained without changing one’s perspective about the nature of official counts. They come less from measuring child maltreatment than measuring the divergent ways that state systems of child protection and welfare work to account for their expenses and report about their operations
EDGE-STREAMER: A Lightweight, Self-Supervised Event Segmentation Model
No full textEvent segmentation is the practice of autonomously detecting the boundaries of semantically connected sequences of actions within a video. It is connected to many areas of computer vision, including action recognition and event understanding. Nearly all current work requires the entire video to be stored in memory to be processed in multiple passes. This takes up valuable resources, increases processing time, prevents the use of low-power, low-memory devices, and precludes long-form content and live videos from undergoing event segmentation.
This thesis introduces EDGE-STREAMER, a real-time, lightweight, self-supervised, transformer architecture capable of performing event segmentation in a single pass. EDGE-STREAMER uses techniques from reinforcement learning models to store representative information about the past to predict events, rather than the entire video. It takes advantage of weight sharing to reduce model size, further reducing its memory footprint and its training requirements. During training the model processes unlabeled video data in a single pass, producing event boundaries in real time.
On Epic-Kitchens EDGE-STREAMER achieves the same MoF performance as STREAMER within 2\%. On an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, it sustains over 16 fps, showing that it is capable of real-time performance on an edge device.
The contributions of this thesis are 1. Four low-memory event segmentation architectures. 2. A thorough analysis comparing the accuracies of EDGE-STREAMER to the state-of-the-art. 3. Experimental data showing the viability of EDGE-STREAMER on edge hardware. These results open the door for embedded device-based cameras, such as those used for surveillance, autonomous drones, and wearables, and provide possibilities for future work, including multi-modal streaming and embedded-device continual learning
Evaluating Behavioral Skills Training to Teach Salsa Dancing Skills to Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder and/or Intellectual Disabilities
No full textResearch has demonstrated behavioral skills training (BST) to be an effective teaching procedure for acquisition of a variety of skills among both neurotypical and neurodiverse individuals across different ages. Moreover, recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of BST for enhancing sports performance when training neurotypical children and adults. However, there is limited research on the effectiveness of BST for enhancing sports performance, and specifically dance performance, among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and/or intellectual disabilities (ID). Dance is a recreational activity that can serve as a form of physical activity for children and adults. Salsa is a Latin style of music and dance with mix origins of Caribbean and Spanish Harlem that provides benefits to health and fitness. For individuals with ASD and/or ID, dance may need to be taught systematically using a procedure such as BST. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of BST for teaching salsa dance skills to adults with ASD and/or ID using a multiple baseline across participant’s design. The study included six participants with autism or developmental disabilities. The results showed that BST produced an immediate improvement in the percentage of steps performed correctly of the salsa skills and maintained during follow up
Telecollaboration as an Approach to Facilitating Intercultural Communicative Competence and Exposure to Arabic Dialects in Arabic as Foreign Language Classrooms in the US: Exploring Teachers’ Perspectives and Practices
No full textThe literature on foreign language education shows an increasing interest in incorporating intercultural communicative competence in the foreign language curriculum. However, making intercultural communicative competence an active component in Arabic as a foreign language curriculum in the United States has been overshadowed by a heavy emphasis placed on developing learners’ grammatical competence instead. Intercultural communicative competence has been proven to help language learners develop an awareness of their own culture and other cultures, an appreciation for both the target language and culture, and a set of necessary skills that allow them to communicate effectively and appropriately with others. Intercultural communicative competence is an effective way to counter overgeneralized stereotypes against Arabs, especially now when perceptions of a large number of Americans towards Arabs and their cultures are engulfed in stereotypes and characterized by misinformation and misconceptions. Telecollaboration or online intercultural exchanges have been proven to be one of the effective pedagogical strategies to facilitate intercultural communicative competence. Research has shown that telecollaborative activities have led to both intercultural and linguistic gains. While extensive research explored the effect of using internet-based intercultural exchanges to facilitate language learners’ intercultural and linguistic gains across various languages, little to no research is available which manifests the perspectives and practices of Arabic as foreign language teachers in using telecollaboration for facilitating intercultural communicative competence in terms of Byram’s ICC model and exposing students to Arabic as a multidialectal language.
In this inquiry, I explored AFL instructors’ perspectives and practices regarding the effectiveness of telecollaboration in enhancing Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) learners’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and linguistic skills in Arabic as a multiglossic language. The participants of this study were 11 Arabic as a foreign language instructors at the tertiary level. The results indicate significant insights into the use of telecollaboration to enhance Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) learners’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and multidialectal skills. It highlights the multifaceted benefits of telecollaboration, such as facilitating the acquisition of both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and dialects, fostering authentic cultural immersion, countering stereotypes and skills of discovery, and promoting learners’ intercultural attitudes of openness and curiosity. The findings strongly suggest that telecollaboration supports learners in connecting classroom theory with real-world applications, cultivating fluency over accuracy in communication, and navigating the complexities of Arabic’s diglossic nature. While logistical challenges such as time zone coordination and differing institutional schedules were noted, instructors emphasized the profound impact of telecollaboration in building dialect(s) proficiency, intercultural awareness, and intercultural relationships, with many learners forming meaningful connections and relationships with their language partners overseas. According to the participants, these exchanges not only dismantled learners’ media-driven preconceived notions but also fostered their critical thinking and deep cultural engagement, making telecollaboration a transformative educational experience for AFL learners
Beyond Political Democracy and Plebiscitary Citizenship: Accounting for New Modes of Participation and Citizenry in Saudi Arabia
No full textThis dissertation addresses the global need to understand the evolving state-society relationship in a developmental state. The reforms in Saudi Arabia are widely gaining attention for abandoning the country’s longstanding illiberal practices. Yet, the state remains conventionally conservative in numerous ways for citizen and non-citizen populations. The dissertation employs a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and a set of conceptual frameworks to analyze what the reforms indicate about the concepts of democracy and citizenship. The dissertation is divided into three journal-style articles. The first article of the dissertation analyzes three reforms to find implicit or explicit evidence of rights and public interaction to make a case for democratic legitimacy in an authoritarian state. The second article is a cross-national quantitative study using panel data to analyze the correlation between electoral democracy and public trust in the government and situate the results in the case study of Saudi Arabia. The third paper is a qualitative interview study with the objective of comprehending the citizenry of the large non-citizen population; their perceptions of the changes in the country; and their modes of navigation. The growing literature on the reforms in Saudi Arabia follows suit with the previous literature written from macro-economic and political lenses owing to its status as an oil-exporting and Muslim-majority state. The findings of this work uniquely advance our understanding of the growing paradoxes of rights and public interaction in an authoritarian state and civic citizenry of non-national populations. This study will advance sociological analyses of a diverse population and shed light on new modes of participation in a nation’s development and the civic ties and lives of people, thus ultimately becoming grounds for impactful and representative policies. Hence, this research will advocate for a new perspective on viewing and enacting democracy and citizenship