Cost of Services and Incentives in the UK Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) Demonstration: Preliminary Analysis

This report presents a preliminary analysis of the cost of operating Britain's Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) demonstration, which is being evaluated though a large-scale randomised control trial. This assessment of costs will become an important element of the full cost-benefit analysis to be presented in future ERA reports. Aimed at helping low-income individuals sustain employment and progress in work, ERA is distinguished by a combination of job coaching and financial incentives that it offers to participants once they are working. The ERA demonstration project began operations in late 2003 as a pilot programme administered by Jobcentre Plus in six regions of the country

The Double Bind of Redevelopment: Camden During Receivership

This working paper finds that successful redevelopment efforts in Camden, New Jersey, under state receivership were able to build on groups' existing capacities and their past work in neighborhoods, were marked by more effective participatory dynamics and the limited use of eminent domain, and benefited from good relationships with the State of New Jersey and with private-sector partners. It concludes that attempts to build public capacity to revitalize cities may need to be complemented by efforts to build civic capacity, or the ability to solve problems in coordination with major partners

Welfare-to-Work Program Benefits and Costs: A Synthesis of Research

Most welfare programs seek to ensure that poor families have adequate income while at the same time encouraging self-sufficiency. Based on studies of 28 programs involving more than 100,000 sample members, this synthesis compares the costs, benefits, and returns on investment of six welfare program strategies -- from the perspectives of participants, government budgets, and society as a whole

Have Welfare-To-Work Programs Improved Over Time In Putting Welfare Recipients To Work?

Data from 76 experimental welfare-to-work programs conducted in the United States between 1983 and 1998 are used to investigate whether the impacts of such programs on employment had been improving over time and whether specific program features influencing such changes can be identified. Over the period, an increasing percentage of control group members received services similar to those offered to program group members. As a result, differential participation in program service activities between program and control group members decreased steadily over time. This reduction in the net receipt of program services tended to reduce the impact of these programs on employment. However, the negative influence of the reduced incremental services was offset by other factors that resulted in program impacts remaining essentially constant from 1983 to 1998. Suggestions are made for possibly improving program impacts in future experiments.Welfare Programs; Program Evaluation; Employment Behavior of Low-Income Families; Meta Analysis

A sweep algorithm for massively parallel simulation of circuit-switched networks

A new massively parallel algorithm is presented for simulating large asymmetric circuit-switched networks, controlled by a randomized-routing policy that includes trunk-reservation. A single instruction multiple data (SIMD) implementation is described, and corresponding experiments on a 16384 processor MasPar parallel computer are reported. A multiple instruction multiple data (MIMD) implementation is also described, and corresponding experiments on an Intel IPSC/860 parallel computer, using 16 processors, are reported. By exploiting parallelism, our algorithm increases the possible execution rate of such complex simulations by as much as an order of magnitude

SNAP: Stateful Network-Wide Abstractions for Packet Processing

Early programming languages for software-defined networking (SDN) were built on top of the simple match-action paradigm offered by OpenFlow 1.0. However, emerging hardware and software switches offer much more sophisticated support for persistent state in the data plane, without involving a central controller. Nevertheless, managing stateful, distributed systems efficiently and correctly is known to be one of the most challenging programming problems. To simplify this new SDN problem, we introduce SNAP. SNAP offers a simpler "centralized" stateful programming model, by allowing programmers to develop programs on top of one big switch rather than many. These programs may contain reads and writes to global, persistent arrays, and as a result, programmers can implement a broad range of applications, from stateful firewalls to fine-grained traffic monitoring. The SNAP compiler relieves programmers of having to worry about how to distribute, place, and optimize access to these stateful arrays by doing it all for them. More specifically, the compiler discovers read/write dependencies between arrays and translates one-big-switch programs into an efficient internal representation based on a novel variant of binary decision diagrams. This internal representation is used to construct a mixed-integer linear program, which jointly optimizes the placement of state and the routing of traffic across the underlying physical topology. We have implemented a prototype compiler and applied it to about 20 SNAP programs over various topologies to demonstrate our techniques' scalability