Elements of Success in Welfare to Work Programs: Programmatic and Policy Recommendations

An analysis of eight welfare-to-work programs between 1998 and 2000 in Chicago to identify successful program elements, isolate barriers to employment presented by participants, and make recommendations for welfare reform policy. The programs were both large and small, of both long and short duration, and provided a variety of services, from vocational training to shorter job placement-focused activities. By reviewing quantitative findings within the context of qualitative data gathered through staff and participant interviews, we have identified elements of successful programming and welfare policy recommendations that flow from them.Sample Demographics: Our sample consisted of 843 participants in these eight programs over the two-year period.-- The mean number of children across the sample was 2.57.-- 46.7% had earned a high school diploma or GED.-- Average reading levels were 7.70 and 6.46 for math.-- 81.5% of the sample had been employed at some point prior to entering the program.-- The average length of time on welfare was 6.97 years.Employment Rates and Drop Rates: Analyzing all those participants who showed up at the programs after intake, the employment rate was 56.1% and the drop rate was 43.9%. Those who found employment were younger, had a slightly lower average number of children, and slightly more had been ever employed prior to entering the program.Reasons for Program Drop Outs: The four most commonly cited reasons for drop were child care, health, substance abuse, and low literacy.Child care drop outs were on average older, more poorly educated, and less likely to have been employed in the past. Almost half the child care drop outs had school age children in addition to younger children, giving rise to the hypothesis that they had difficulty in finding child care for so many different age groups.Nearly 80% of the health problems involved the health of the participant rather than other family members. Women who dropped out due to health problems had higher literacy and numeracy levels than the overall sample, as well as a much longer average time on welfare (11.95 years versus 6.97 years). Fewer participants with health problems had ever been employed (75.6%) compared to the overall sample (81.7%), indicating that these health problems have and continue to be employment barriers. Substance abusers dropped out later in the program than other drop outs. They too have been on welfare for a longer time than the overall sample- 8.67 years versus 6.97 years. Since their average employment history was about the same as the overall sample, it is likely that substance abuse causes participants to lose successive jobs, a factor that is associated with longer stays on welfare. Participants who dropped out due to low literacy had average reading scores of 4.54 and math scores of 3.96, considerably lower than the overall sample, and had longer years on welfare (8.34 compared to 6.46 for the entire sample). In addition, they had been employed far less than the sample (55% compared to 81.7%), indicating that their low literacy presented a significant barrier to employment

360 Quantified Self

Wearable devices with a wide range of sensors have contributed to the rise of the Quantified Self movement, where individuals log everything ranging from the number of steps they have taken, to their heart rate, to their sleeping patterns. Sensors do not, however, typically sense the social and ambient environment of the users, such as general life style attributes or information about their social network. This means that the users themselves, and the medical practitioners, privy to the wearable sensor data, only have a narrow view of the individual, limited mainly to certain aspects of their physical condition. In this paper we describe a number of use cases for how social media can be used to complement the check-up data and those from sensors to gain a more holistic view on individuals' health, a perspective we call the 360 Quantified Self. Health-related information can be obtained from sources as diverse as food photo sharing, location check-ins, or profile pictures. Additionally, information from a person's ego network can shed light on the social dimension of wellbeing which is widely acknowledged to be of utmost importance, even though they are currently rarely used for medical diagnosis. We articulate a long-term vision describing the desirable list of technical advances and variety of data to achieve an integrated system encompassing Electronic Health Records (EHR), data from wearable devices, alongside information derived from social media data.Comment: QCRI Technical Repor

Crop rotations for grain production

There is an increasing demand for organically grown cereal grains in Denmark, which is expected to cause a change in the typical organic farm structure away from dairy farming and towards arable farming. Such a change may reduce the stability of the farming systems, because of decreasing soil fertility and problems with weed control. There have only been a limited number of studies under temperate conditions in Europe and North America, where different crop rotations have been compared under organic farming or similar production conditions

Scale disparities and magnetohydrodynamics in the Earth’s core

Fluid motions driven by convection in the Earth’s fluid core sustain geomagnetic ­ fields by magnetohydrodynamic dynamo processes. The dynamics of the core is critically influenced by the combined effects of rotation and magnetic ­ fields. This paper attempts to illustrate the scale-related difficulties in modelling a convection-driven geodynamo by studying both linear and nonlinear convection in the presence of imposed toroidal and poloidal ­ fields. We show that there exist three extremely large disparities, as a direct consequence of small viscosity and rapid rotation of the Earth’s fluid core, in the spatial, temporal and amplitude scales of a convection-driven geodynamo. We also show that the structure and strength of convective motions, and, hence, the relevant dynamo action, are extremely sensitive to the intricate dynamical balance between the viscous, Coriolis and Lorentz forces; similarly, the structure and strength of the magnetic field generated by the dynamo process can depend very sensitively on the fluid flow. We suggest, therefore, that the zero Ekman number limit is strongly singular and that a stable convection-driven strong-­field geodynamo satisfying Taylor’s constraint may not exist. Instead, the geodynamo may vacillate between a strong ­field state, as at present, and a weak ­ field state, which is also unstable because it fails to convect sufficient heat