The Association between Intimate Partner Violence and Conflict Disengagement in Newlywed Couples

Researcher Rupsha Singh examined the association between attachment, conflict avoidance, conflict intensity and intimate partner violence (IPV) in a sample of 114 heterosexual newlywed couples using actor-partner interdependence modeling.

This study looked at emotional dysregulation and avoidance that may lead to IPV. It also looks at insecure adult attachment styles as well as both avoidant and anxious attachment being associated with IPV.

A reflection written by Women’s Center intern, Narges Ershad

It has been more than a month since Oscars has aired, speeches have been given, and many reactions have been shared. But as Pay Equity Day is approaching, I have been thinking a lot about that night, especially Patricia Arquette’s Best Support Actress acceptance speech. In her speech she talked about the gender pay gap, which is a reference to the fact that mostly men get paid more than women for holding the same position at work.

Since I was a kid, watching Oscars was one of my favorite days of the year. Until few years ago I wouldn’t understand the content fully due to language barriers, but I was always amazed by the pretty dresses, exciting faces of the people, the lights, amazing videography, and that huge and amazing stage. Later on I was able to understand the content fully and it was then when I realized Oscars is more than a fancy award ceremony to recognize the achievements within the film industry. The Oscars can also be about social change, a place to raise awareness regarding social issues, a stage for critical thinking and reading between the lines.

I was excited as always with the 2015 Oscars and made sure I had time to travel back to my childhood by watching the ceremony. But something was different in the 2015 Oscars, that made me love this ceremony even more, as well as also think more critically about it. Many amazing speeches  were given regarding social issues and problems that we are dealing with in the world, and most importantly in United States of America. Many moving speeches and performances were given that night, like John Legend and Common’s Glory from the movie Selma.

In my opinion Patricia Arquette speech was a great move, which took a lot of attention toward it in social media right after she left the stage. One part of her speech stated that “It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.” I personally really appreciated her speech and her using her fame to give gender pay gap a platform at an elite event. As an individual who works and cares about the gender pay gap, I really liked the fact that now more people who might have not known about the issue now know. Perhaps from knowing more about the issue these individuals will be able to think about  it more in depth or even make strides to changing the situation for  the better.

Throughout much of the evening, our events of Critical Social Justice 2015 came to mind. Most especially, I was reminded by what they keynote speaker, Franchesca Ramsey, talked about in her keynote titled “Your Powerful Online Voice: Social Media for Social Change.” The Oscars were taking place in a room, but the conversations were also happening in our living rooms and entering various social media platforms. Social media became a tool for change and started many needed, important, and critical conversations. People used their “online voices” via social media, especially Twitter, to bring social change to talk about issues that famous people on stage were talking about in real time. This is where people used their voices to bring light to the speeches, read between the lines, and start a conversation about needed social change. For example many different readings, understanding, and reactions were seen on social media platforms after Patricia Arquette’s speech. People were able to take it in, analyze it, and and talk about it. Some people completely agreed with her, some people wished she would have talked about other communities as well, some people argued that her speech was gender binary, some people liked the specific points that she had. The conversation didn’t end when the Oscars did but they had only just begun. As we are approaching Pay Equity Day I think is important to take a moment, educate ourselves about this issue and see what we can do close the gap.

Last year’s pay equity bake sale! Be sure to stop by the 2015 bake sale on 4/6 from 11am-2pm!

In the past few years Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL) at UMBC have hosted a Pay Equity Bake Sale, to start the conversation on campus. This bake sale is a great start to many critical conversations. Each person who visits the table and would like to purchase a bake good is asked to self identify based on the provided chart , to see how much they need to pay and they can see how much other individuals are going to pay. In other words these prices are link to the gender pay gap that exists in united states. This is a way to get people thinking, to see how much they are getting paid compared to others. Also we understand that the provided chart is gender binary, and is fully accurate but this suggests that more research and thinking is needed in this area.

Moreover one of the reasons for this wage gap, is that mostly women start working with a lower salary compare to men, therefore it is important to learn how to start smart from the beginning. WILL with the help of GWST department, Women’s Center,and the Honors College is providing UMBC students with a workshop called $tart $mart. As someone who has participated at this workshop I highly recommend it. I learned how to negotiate for my salary and ask to receive what I am worth. This workshop will be held on April 15th. Please visit this link for more information and registration as the space is limited.

Also I encourage you all to visit WILL table  Monday April 6th from 11:00AM-2:00PM. Visit this link for more information.

Name: Anisha Khandelwal

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: Maxim Healthcare Services | Title of Your Position: Corporate Compliance Intern

Major(s)/Minor(s): Psychology, Health Administration and Policy, BA/MPP

Expected Graduation Year: May 2015

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service-learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

As the Corporate Compliance Intern at Maxim Healthcare Services, I assist with both compliance trainings and policy development. I assist with organizing and implementing campaign ideas. I create communication posts which are included in Maxim's newsletters are e-mailed to over 40,000 employees. I prepare outlines and test questions for compliance trainings. I proofread, edit, and revise documents, forms, and presentations. I revise and compare current and prior policy implementations. I also provide assistance with other assignments when needed.

Describe the process of obtaining your internship, research, or co-op opportunity.

I found my internship with Maxim's Healthcare Services and research opportunity with UMBC's CWIT on UMBCworks. For the internship, I first submitted an application on UMBCworks. The initial interview was conducted over the telephone and was with an HR representative. I was interested in three internships with Maxim Healthcare Services but it was during this conversation that I decided compliance would be the best for me. This was followed by an in-person interview with one of my current managers. The third interview was an in-person interview with the Vice President of Compliance at Maxim Healthcare Services. A few days after, I received a telephone call and was offered the position. Similarly, I also found my research assistantship for UMBC's CWIT on UMBCworks. There was only one interview for this position and it was a telephone interview. I also notified of my offer for this position by a telephone call.

Which of the following resources did you use to find your current experience?

UMBCworks

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

What I have enjoyed the most about both my positions are my managers. I have been fortunate to have managers who truly care and who are truly interested in my success. My managers are extremely supportive, are like advisors, and even help me prepare for future positions.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

I believe that both my internship and research assistantship have provided me with an array of skills, practice, and experiences that will surely be beneficial for helping me succeed in future jobs and duties. This compliance internship is my first health policy internship and has allowed me to learn about the development of compliance trainings, campaigning in a corporate setting where there are limitations, and policy development. My research assistantship has improved my skills in conducting focus groups and exit interviews, organizing events, increased my knowledge of qualitative data, and how to use WordPress to update a website.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

I highly encourage other students to apply and obtain internships, research experiences, and other experiences.These experiences may further increase your interest in your academics, help you realize what kinds of experiences and duties you are interested in, help you realize your strengths and areas of opportunity, will help you learn more about the industry and field that your experience is in, and will definitely help with applying for future positions.

Please provide a short reflection or quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process.

I believe that if you find positions that you truly are passionate about then you will never have to work a day in your life. That is how I feel with this research assistantship and internship. I have had other internships, research assistantships, and jobs that I was not as interested in but these other experienced helped me obtain skills to be successful in my current positions and to realize what kinds of duties I am indeed passionate about.

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PhD Dissertation Defense

Physical- and MAC-Layer Mechanisms for Increasing
Base-Station Anonymity in Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

John Ward

10:00am Monday, 13 April 2015, ITE 325b, UMBC

Wireless ad hoc networks have become valuable assets to both the commercial and military communities with applications ranging from industrial control on a factory floor to reconnaissance of a hostile border. In most applications, data sources forward information over multi-hop paths to a base station (BS). The BS not only serves as the data sink, but also provides other basic control and management features such as protocol synchronization, a gateway to other networks, and operator failure notifications, without which the network becomes dysfunctional. The critical role of the BS makes it a natural target for an adversary that desires to achieve the most impactful attack on the network. Even if an ad-hoc network employs conventional security mechanisms such as encryption and authentication, an adversary may apply traffic analysis techniques to identify the BS. This motivates a significant need for achieving improved BS anonymity to conceal its identity, role, and location. Traffic analysis countermeasures found in the literature have focused on the link and network layers and little attention has been given to the physical-layer (PHY) approaches.

In this dissertation, we address the challenges of BS anonymity by developing PHY and Medium Access Control (MAC) traffic analysis countermeasures. We first consider the limitations associated with evidence theory, the adversary’s primary traffic analysis attack model. We analyze the susceptibility of evidence theory to imperfect received signal strength (RSS) measurements. Next we extend the standard evidence theory approach to consider the contribution of acknowledgements to BS anonymity. We call this approach Acknowledgement Aware Evidence Theory (AAET) and describe the adversary’s initial survey phase which is based on a novel message correlation approach. Accurate synchronization is required by an ad-hoc network to employ PHY countermeasures; however, synchronization represents a fundamental design tradeoff, since the low-cost nodes and conservation of energy limit the achievable accuracy of synchronization within the network. We consider the impact of two popular synchronization protocols, Reference Broadcast Synchronization (RBS) and Timing-Synch Protocol for Sensor Networks (TPSN) on BS anonymity.

We develop a novel PHY BS anonymity-boosting approach based on distributed beamforming, which we call Distributed Beamforming protocol for increased BS ANonymity (DiBAN). DiBAN is a protocol that includes a cross-layer relay selection algorithm that a node employs to determine the most appropriate number of helper relays to participate in distributed beamforming at each hop. While effective at increasing BS anonymity, the overhead associated with DiBAN is in addition to any overhead already associated with existing ad hoc network protocols. We refine DiBAN using cross-layer design methodology to create an integrated distributed beamforming protocol called Link and Physical Cross-layer design for increased Anonymity (LiPCA) that increases BS anonymity with minor additional overhead by taking advantage of the underlying services that the MAC already provides. We use simulation to demonstrate the anonymity performance and energy-efficiency of our approaches and use the popular Sensor MAC (S-MAC) protocol as an exemplar MAC protocol. Results show that the cross-layer design of our LiPCA protocol achieves equivalent anonymity performance to DiBAN, but with an energy savings of approximately 35 percent.

Committee: Drs. Mohamed Younis (Chair), Charles Nicholas, Richard Forno, Ryan Robucci and Pedro Rodriguez (JHU/APL)

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense
Electrical Engineering

Simultaneous Polarization-Insensitive Phase-space
Trans-multiplexingand Wavelength Multicasting via
Cross-phase Modulation in a Photonic Crystal Fiber at 10 GBd

Brice Cannon

2:00pm Monday, 6 April 2015, ITE325b, UMBC

This thesis investigates the all-optical combination of amplitude and phase modulated signals into one unified multi-level phase modulated signal, utilizing the Kerr nonlinearity of cross-phase modulation (XPM). Predominantly, the first experimental demonstration of simultaneous polarization-insensitive phase-transmultiplexing and multicasting (PI-PTMM) will be discussed. The PI-PTMM operation combines the data of a single 10-Gbaud carrier-suppressed return-to-zero (CSRZ) on-off keyed (OOK) pump signal and 4×10-Gbaud return-to-zero (RZ) binary phase-shift keyed (BPSK) probe signals to generate 4×10-GBd RZ-quadrature phase-shift keyed (QPSK) signals utilizing a highly nonlinear, birefringent photonic crystal fiber (PCF). Since XPM is a highly polarization dependent nonlinearity, a polarization sensitivity reduction technique was used to alleviate the fluctuations due to the remotely generated signals’ unpredictable states of polarization (SOP). The measured amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) limited receiver sensitivity optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) penalty of the PI-PTMM signal relative to the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) pre-coded RZ-DQPSK baseline at a forward-error correction (FEC) limit of 10-3 BER was ≈ 0.3 dB. In addition, the OSNR of the remotely generated CSRZ-OOK signal could be degraded to ≈ 29 dB/0.1nm, before the bit error rate (BER) performance of the PI-PTMM operation began to exponentially degrade. A 138-km dispersion-managed recirculating loop system with a 100-GHz, 13-channel mixed-format dense-wavelength-division multiplexed (DWDM) transmitter was constructed to investigate the effect of metro/long-haul transmission impairments. The PI-PTMM DQPSK and the FPGA pre-coded RZ-DQPSK baseline signals were transmitted 1,900 km and 2,400 km in the nonlinearity-limited transmission regime before reaching the 10-3 BER FEC limit. The relative reduction in transmission distance for the PI-PTMM signal was due to the additional transmitter impairments in the PCF that interact negatively with the transmission fiber.

Committee: Drs. Professor Gary M. Carter (Chair), William Astar, Anthony M. Johnson, Tinoosh Mohsenin, Thomas E. Murphy, Terrance L. Worchesky

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense
Computer Engineering

PSANDE: A Framework for Accurate Dynamic
Power Supply Analysis and Delay Estimation

Sushmita K. Rao

11:30am Friday, 3 April 2015, ITE 325b, UMBC

Power-supply noise is a major contributing factor for yield loss in sub-micron designs. Excessive switching in test mode causes supply voltage to droop more than in functional mode, leading to failures in delay tests that would not occur otherwise under normal operation. There exists a need to accurately estimate on-chip supply noise early in the design phase to meet power requirements in normal mode and during test to prevent over-stimulation during testing and avoid false failures. Simultaneous switching activity (SSA) of several logic components is one of the main sources of power-supply noise (PSN) which results in reduction of supply voltages at the power-supplies of the logic gates. Current research concentrates on static IR-drop, which accounts for only part of the total voltage drop on the power grid and therefore is insufficient for nanometer designs. Inductive drop is not included in current noise analysis techniques for simplification.

The power delivery networks in today’s very deep-submicron chips are susceptible to slight variations and cause sudden large current spikes leading to higher Ldi/dt drop than resistive drop, necessitating the need to be accounted. Especially of concern is simultaneous switching in localized areas in a chip because it concentrates current drawn on a particular power bump further reducing supply voltage. Thus, there arises a growing need to accurately characterize the resistive and inductive voltage drop caused by simultaneous switching of multiple paths. Power-supply noise also impacts circuit operation, causing a significant increase in path delays. It is critical to account for this increase in delay during the ATPG process otherwise it can lead to overkill during transition and delay testing. However, it is infeasible to carry out full-chip SPICE-level simulations on a design to validate the large number of ATPG generated test patterns. Accurate and efficient techniques are required to quantify supply noise and its impact on path delays to ensure reliable operation in both mission mode and during test.

A scalable current-based dynamic method is presented to estimate both IR and Ldi/dt drop caused by simultaneous switching activity. Also presented is a technique to predict the increase in path delays caused by supply noise. The noise and delay estimation techniques use simulations of individual extracted switching logic in comparison to time-consuming full-chip simulations and thus it can be integrated with existing ATPG tools. A design partitioning technique is also presented that makes the framework feasible for larger designs. Supply noise estimation error is less than 12% of SPICE level full-chip results across all test cases in the combinational and sequential benchmark circuits. The effect of power supply noise on path delays is modeled effectively. Results from multiple designs show that using the convolution-based technique the increase in path delay can be accurately predicted with a worst case error of 4% as compared to full-chip simulation results demonstrating the effectiveness of the technique.

Committee: Drs. Chintan Patel (Chair), Dhananjay Phatak, Ryan Robucci, Nilanjan Banerjee and Ismed Hartanto (Xilinx)