University of Rhode Island

About: University of Rhode Island is a education organization based out in Kingston, Rhode Island, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Bay. The organization has 11464 authors who have published 22770 publications receiving 841066 citations. The organization is also known as: URI & Rhode Island College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.

Peer group membership and a sense of belonging: their relationship to adolescent behavior problems.

Abstract: This study explored three aspects of peer group membership in adolescence: peer group affiliation, the importance of group membership, and a sense of peer group belonging. Each is considered in relationship to adolescents' behavior problems as measured by the Achenbach Youth Self-Report. Participants included an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of 733 adolescents ranging in age from 11 to 18 years. Girls reported more internalizing problems and boys reported more externalizing problems. Girls also reported a higher sense of peer group belonging than boys. When controlling for adolescent age, gender, ethnicity, parent's educational level, and family structure, a sense of peer group belonging was negatively related to internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Adolescents who viewed peer group membership as very important to them and had a positive sense of peer group belonging had significantly fewer behavior problems than those who viewed peer group membership as very important but did not have a positive sense of peer group belonging.

Optimal Signal Design for Detection of Gaussian Point Targets in Stationary Gaussian Clutter/Reverberation

Abstract: In this paper, we address the design of an optimal transmit signal and its corresponding optimal detector for a radar or active sonar system. The focus is on the temporal aspects of the waveform with the spatial aspects to be described in a future paper. The assumptions involved in modeling the clutter/reverberation return are crucial to the development of the optimal detector and its consequent optimal signal design. In particular, the target is assumed to be a Gaussian point target and the clutter/reverberation a stationary Gaussian random process. In practice, therefore, the modeling will need to be assessed and possibly extended, and additionally a means of measuring the "in-situ" clutter/reverberation spectrum will be required. The advantages of our approach are that a simple analytical result is obtained which is guaranteed to be optimal, and also the extension to spatial-temporal signal design is immediate using ideas of frequency-wavenumber representations. Some examples are given to illustrate the signal design procedure as well as the calculation of the increase in processing gain. Finally, the results are shown to be an extension of the usual procedure which places the signal energy in the noise band having minimum power