Seeking A Sustainable Journey to Work: Findings from the National Bridges to Work Demonstration

The Bridges to Work demonstration was designed to test whether efforts to help inner-city job seekers overcome barriers to accessing suburban jobs would result in better employment opportunities and earnings for these workers. This report examines outcomes for more than 1,800 applicants to Bridges to Work, half of whom were randomly selected to receive the programs transportation, job placement and supportive services for up to 18 months and half who were not offered these services. The researchers found that Bridges to Work did not positively impact participants employment and earnings, results that were consistent across cities and across various strategies for providing transportation services. Given the programs implementation challenges, costs and lack of results, the report concludes that the Bridges model is not a viable policy response to the mismatch between the location of jobs and the location of unemployed workers. However, the models lack of success does not diminish the importance of improving transportation options to increase workers access to employment, and the authors derive a number of important lessons from the demonstrations experience to inform future mobility efforts

Confirmation: Origins and Reform

Reviewed Book: Kavanagh, Aidan. Confirmation: Origins and Reform. New York: Pueblo Pub, 1988

Animus Thick and Thin: The Broader Impact of the Ninth Circuit Decision in \u3ci\u3ePerry V. Brown\u3c/i\u3e

This essay is a response to an article by: Eskridge Jr., William N., The Ninth Circuit\u27s Perry Decision and the Constitutional Politics of Marriage Equality, in 64 Stan. L. Rev. Online 93 (2012). This essay examines the impact of Perry v. Brown, 671 F.3d 1052 (9th Cir. 2012), the first appellate federal court decision on the constitutional validity of marriage exclusion laws. The author argues that the major contribution of the Perry decision is to illuminate the meaning of animus, a term that is sharply contested in Equal Protection jurisprudence, and to explicate its relationship to standards of review. The Ninth Circuit holds that evidence of animosity toward a disfavored group triggers a heightened rational basis standard of review. The Supreme Court has not yet settled on how to analyze evidence of animus. In his dissent in Romer v. Evans, Justice Scalia ridiculed the idea that believing homosexuality to be immoral could be compared to racial or religious bias. By contrast, in her concurrence in Lawrence v. Texas, Justice O’Connor articulated the principle adopted by the Ninth Circuit in Perry: that laws driven by animus toward a social group are subject to a “more searching” version of rational basis review. The majority of Justices, however, appear to be gunshy about even acknowledging the existence of heightened rational basis review, even though they have been relying on it sub silentio for several decades. The Perry court provides the fullest articulation of it to date. The Court of Appeals in Perry also takes a new perspective on how courts should assess the validity of popularly enacted initiatives such as Proposition 8. For both proponents and opponents of popular constitutionalism, the gay marriage debates raise the question of whether voters or courts should get the last word in a constitutional democracy when they take polar opposite positions on a minority rights issue. The Perry opinion would impose less a death knell to such initiatives than a set of speed bumps, through which courts would analyze whether a discriminatory provision was the retraction of a right or a failure to extend it, and whether it had a demonstrably legitimate purpose, other than simply the imposition of stigma. In the gay marriage context, the court left open the possibility that limiting marriage to different sex couples could be justified by the desire to discourage “accidental procreation.” However, based on evidence about the campaign to pass Proposition 8, the court found that animus had been the dominant motivation in this case

Scientific Knowledge Object Patterns

Web technology is revolutionizing the way diverse scientific knowledge is produced and disseminated. In the past few years, a handful of discourse representation models have been proposed for the externalization of the rhetoric and argumentation captured within scientific publications. However, there hasn’t been a unified interoperable pattern that is commonly used in practice by publishers and individual users yet. In this paper, we introduce the Scientific Knowledge Object Patterns (SKO Patterns) towards a general scientific discourse representation model, especially for managing knowledge in emerging social web and semantic web. © ACM, 2011. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is going to be published in "Proceedings of 15th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs", (2011) http://portal.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE197&CFID=8795862&CFTOKEN=1476113