Problem Statement and Research Questions. The NGO Deep Springs International (DSI) supervises the provision of a point of use sodium hypochlorite water treatment solution called Gadyen Dlo or “Water Guardian” along with a safe water storage bucket in Haitian communities. This study focuses on the Gadyen Dlo programs operating in the Nord-Ouest/Artibonite, Nord, and Ouest departments of Haiti which from now on will be referred to as the Jolivert, North and Léogâne programs, respectively. DSI’s headquarters are located in Léogâne, Haiti (Léogane Program, Ouest department) with field offices in Jolivert (Jolivert Program, Nord-Ouest/Artibonite departments) and Milot (North program, North department). The geographical features, existing infrastructure, program history, and distribution models of the Gadyen Dlo product vary between each of these program sites. In all sites, the Gadyen Dlo program predated the arrival of cholera. While cholera is a country-wide epidemic in Haiti, the extent to which cholera affected the individual communities that Gadyen Dlo served has not been measured. This study uses qualitative methodology to explore how perceptions of cholera influence household water treatment behaviors in communities within these different program regions. Findings from the study will be used to inform DSI’s program operations and create strategies to increase sales, coverage and uptake of Gadyen Dlo in each program region. The following three research questions will direct the structure, analysis and discussion of qualitative data collected through focus group discussions with Haitian community members.
1) What are the perceptions of cholera in the community?
2) What are the factors influencing decisions about point of use (POU) household water treatment (HHWT) in a community?
3) What role did cholera play in the uptake and use of point of use household water treatment in the community?
Problem Statement and Research Questions belonging to another processor using a shared interconnect network. The outcome of having many memory modules is that memory access time varies with the location of the data to be accessed. Each processor in a NUMA machine is multi-core. In the thesis, our goal is to work with both NUMA-based multi-core systems and UMA-based many-core systems for both the design and the implementation of the algorithms.
Problem Statement and Research Questions. The MCTS algorithm is a good candidate for parallelization. This has been known since the introduction of the algorithm in 2006 [Cou06, KS06, EM10]. However, until now, the research community has only used thread-level parallelization when paral- lelizing the algorithm. The current parallel programming approaches are unstructured and do not use modern parallel programming patterns, languages, and libraries. We aim to address the complications of designing parallel algorithms for MCTS using the modern techniques, tools, and machines which are discussed above. We focus on both NUMA and MIC architectures to evaluate our implementations. Therefore, the Problem Statement (PS) of the thesis is as follows.
Problem Statement and Research Questions. It is a common discourse in Kazakhstan that policy-making and reform are top-down processes, and society serves as implementers or executors of the laws and policies prescribed by the centralized government (Xxxxxxxxx, Xxxx, & Xxxxxx, 2008). For example, scholarly work on inclusive education in Kazakhstan often starts with listing international and national agendas such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, the Salamanca Statement, and the Law on Education in the Republic of Kazakhstan of 2007 with its amendments. A significantly smaller portion of discourse focuses on grassroots bottom-up movements that advocate for inclusive education reform. Whether the process of reformation is entirely top-down is what this research aims to challenge by exploring the activism of non-governmental organizations. The assumption is that as policies need to be approved by the centralized Ministry of Education; most of the civil activism informing these policies remains unrecognized. To challenge this assumption, the present study aims to answer an overarching research question: “In what ways and to what extent does the civil society contribute to inclusive education reforms in Kazakhstan, as perceived by NGO representatives?”
