135,468 research outputs found
Machine-Readable Privacy Certificates for Services
Privacy-aware processing of personal data on the web of services requires
managing a number of issues arising both from the technical and the legal
domain. Several approaches have been proposed to matching privacy requirements
(on the clients side) and privacy guarantees (on the service provider side).
Still, the assurance of effective data protection (when possible) relies on
substantial human effort and exposes organizations to significant
(non-)compliance risks. In this paper we put forward the idea that a privacy
certification scheme producing and managing machine-readable artifacts in the
form of privacy certificates can play an important role towards the solution of
this problem. Digital privacy certificates represent the reasons why a privacy
property holds for a service and describe the privacy measures supporting it.
Also, privacy certificates can be used to automatically select services whose
certificates match the client policies (privacy requirements).
Our proposal relies on an evolution of the conceptual model developed in the
Assert4Soa project and on a certificate format specifically tailored to
represent privacy properties. To validate our approach, we present a worked-out
instance showing how privacy property Retention-based unlinkability can be
certified for a banking financial service.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure
Transition to Teaching: An Alternative Certification Program through Partnership Between a Public School District and a Public University
The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has had a significant impact on licenses for teachers working in school programs. The act refers to highly qualified teachers in both Title I and Title ll. This paper defines alternative certification programs. This paper then describes a partnership, funded by the US. Department of Education, between a school district and a university to establish an alternative licensure program to train highly qualified secondary mathematics teachers.The goal of this partnership is to provide an infrastructure that supports the recruitment. preparation, placement, induction, and retention of highly qualified teachers through a new alternative route to teacher licensure. In addition, this paper discusses processes and procedures used in the project in light of the literature. lt discusses how candidates were selected for the project, strategies used to meet the competencies for licensure, and assessment of candidates
Certifying Out of Home Operators in Europe. European Forum for Certification. Summary of a Forum held at the BioFach Congress 2009
As in previous years the annual meeting on organic certification in the out-of-home sector took place at the
congress of the BioFach Trade Fair, on the 22nd of February 2009. As a conclusion to this meeting this
report now summarizes the main topics of the “European Forum for Certification” with the focus on the
presentations in Nuremberg. The presenters delivered insight into the various situations in their countries
and indicated the challenges that they currently are dealing with. Depictions included developments in
Belgium, Finland, Italy, Germany, Norway, Switzerland and The Netherlands. After describing and discussing
the issues the country presenters agreed to have this paper developed by the organisers, which gives a
short overview of the proceedings to all participants and to all interested in this topic.
The Council Regulation (EC) No 834/2007 on organic production and labelling of organic products came into
force on January 1, 2009. It repeals the former Regulation (EEC) No 2092/91 and for the first time explicitly
refers to mass catering (out of home). The Regulation excludes catering and eating enterprises from
mandatory certification whilst at the same time giving each country the option how best to proceed. How do
member countries deal with this new situation? The presenters go into detail and this summary
characterizes some detailed situations in the following pages
Highly Qualified Teachers
One of the key features of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 is a requirement that all teachers in core academic areas be “highly qualified” before the 2005-2006 school year. Even more quickly, by the end of the 2002-2003 school year, all newly hired teachers in Title I schools had to be highly qualified. The core academic areas— which must be taught by a “highly qualified” teacher—are English, reading or language arts, math, science, arts and foreign language, economics, geography, civics or government, and history. Teachers of special education and English language learner students are not required to be “highly qualified” unless they are teaching these core courses. The question, however, concerning many teachers, administrators, and parents is—what does “highly qualified” mean? This brief provides a background for NCLB’s “highly qualified” teachers, defines “highly qualified,” and summarizes the actions taken by the State of Arkansas to ensure a “highly qualified” teacher will be in every classroom by the end of the 2005-2006 academic year
Arts at the Core: Every School, Every Student
The profound impact of arts education on children and youth follows them throughout their lives. Arts education rewards our children by helping them to reach practical goals such as academic achievement and career success. Arts education enriches our youth with social, cultural and emotional benefits. As shown in study after study, a widely held belief in the positive value of arts education is shared by parents, teachers, school administrators and arts education experts.This belief is the reason that arts education has historically been an important part of the education of our children in the United States. However, deeper analysis both nationwide and here in Illinois reveals a gap between what individuals, educators and elected officials profess as the value of arts education and what is allocated to arts education in terms of budget, faculty, class time, curriculum, planning and evaluation.Illinois Creates is a broad-based statewide coalition of 150 education, business, civic and arts advocates dedicated to promoting a comprehensive, standards-based arts education program for all Illinois public school students
Certified Reinforcement Learning with Logic Guidance
This paper proposes the first model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL)
framework to synthesise policies for unknown, and continuous-state Markov
Decision Processes (MDPs), such that a given linear temporal property is
satisfied. We convert the given property into a Limit Deterministic Buchi
Automaton (LDBA), namely a finite-state machine expressing the property.
Exploiting the structure of the LDBA, we shape a synchronous reward function
on-the-fly, so that an RL algorithm can synthesise a policy resulting in traces
that probabilistically satisfy the linear temporal property. This probability
(certificate) is also calculated in parallel with policy learning when the
state space of the MDP is finite: as such, the RL algorithm produces a policy
that is certified with respect to the property. Under the assumption of finite
state space, theoretical guarantees are provided on the convergence of the RL
algorithm to an optimal policy, maximising the above probability. We also show
that our method produces ''best available'' control policies when the logical
property cannot be satisfied. In the general case of a continuous state space,
we propose a neural network architecture for RL and we empirically show that
the algorithm finds satisfying policies, if there exist such policies. The
performance of the proposed framework is evaluated via a set of numerical
examples and benchmarks, where we observe an improvement of one order of
magnitude in the number of iterations required for the policy synthesis,
compared to existing approaches whenever available.Comment: This article draws from arXiv:1801.08099, arXiv:1809.0782
Policy Framework for Outreach, Enrollment, Retention and Utilization for Health Care Coverage in California
Defines a framework that counties in California can use to structure outreach, enrollment, retention, and utilization systems and strategies. Provides specific recommendations, based on local successes, for improving access to health care by children
International Education Planning Rubric: State Strategies to Prepare Globally Competent Students
Offers guidance for planning and assessing state strategies to develop students' global competence, including language, communication, and collaboration skills. Lists promising practices in leadership, resource allocation, certification, and curricula
Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence
Teach For America has generated glowing press reports, but the evidence regarding whether this alternative teacher-training program works is very unclear, according to a policy brief released today by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. The brief, Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence, is written by professor Julian Vasquez Heilig of the University of Texas at Austin, and professor Su Jin Jez of California State University, Sacramento. It offers a comprehensive overview of research on the Teach For America (TFA) program, which recruits graduates of elite colleges to teach for two years in hard-to-staff low-income rural and urban schools. Overall, Jez and Heilig argue, the impact of TFA teachers on student achievement is decidedly mixed and dependent upon the experience level of the TFA teachers and the group of teachers with whom they are compared. Studies show that TFA teachers perform fairly well when compared with one segment of the teaching population: other teachers in the same hard-to-staff schools, who are less likely to be certified or traditionally prepared. Compared with that specific group of teachers, TFA teachers "perform comparably in raising reading scores and a bit better in raising math scores," the brief's authors write. Conversely, studies which compare TFA teachers with credentialed non-TFA teachers find that "the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well in reading and mathematics than those of credentialed beginning teachers," Heilig and Jez write. And in a large-scale Houston study, in which the researchers controlled for experience and teachers' certification status, standard certified teachers consistently outperformed uncertified TFA teachers of comparable experience levels in similar settings. The evidence suggests that TFA teachers do get better -- if they stay long enough to become fully credentialed. Those experienced, fully credentialed TFA teachers "appear to do about as well as other, similarly experienced, credentialed teachers in teaching reading ... [and] as well as, and sometimes better than, that comparison group in teaching mathematics," Heilig and Jez write. However, more than half of TFA teachers leave after two years, and more than 80 percent after three. So it's impossible to know whether those who remain have improved because of additional training and experience -- or simply because of "selection bias:" they were more effective than the four out of five TFA teachers who left. The authors note that this high turnover of TFA teachers also results in significant recurring expenses for recruiting and training replacements. Heilig and Jez urge schools and districts to devote resources to a number of proven remedies for improving achievement, including mentoring programs that pair novice and expert teachers, universal pre-school and reduction in early grade class size. The authors conclude, "Policymakers and stakeholders should consider TFA teachers for what they are -- a slightly better alternative when the hiring pool is comprised primarily of uncertified and emergency teachers -- and continue to consider a broad range of solutions to reshape our system of education to ensure that all students are completing schools with the education they need to be successful."This policy brief was produced by the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University with funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. About The Great Lakes Center The mission of the Great Lakes Center is to improve public education for all students in the Great Lakes region through the support and dissemination of high quality, academically sound research on education policy and practices
Psychiatric Boarding in New Hampshire: Violation of a Statutory Right to Treatment
[Excerpt] New Hampshire law provides for the involuntary commitment of a patient such as Jane when she is a danger to herself or others as a result of mental illness. The patient has a right to treatment under N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 135-C:1, et seq. Specifically, the patient should receive adequate and humane treatment pursuant to an individual service plan and in the least restrictive environment necessary. However, appropriate facilities often are not available for patients waiting in emergency rooms, and patients can become trapped for hours or even days. This phenomenon is called psychiatric boarding.
New Hampshire is not alone in providing a statutory right to treatment, and the problem of psychiatric boarding is common in other states. While enforcement of statutory rights to treatment often is elusive, the Washington Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling on psychiatric boarding in August 2014, finding that it violated the state laws protecting involuntarily committed patients.
Could the Washington court\u27s rationale lead to similar conclusions in other states? Looking to New Hampshire as an example, the state statutes for commitment and treatment rights are analogous to Washington\u27s, and this suggests that the Washington ruling could prove a valuable precedent for barring psychiatric boarding in other states.
This Note will compare Washington\u27s involuntary commitment law to New Hampshire\u27s, argue that psychiatric boarding is illegal under New Hampshire law, and propose solutions for complying with the statute, including the continued implementation of community-based services. If New Hampshire implemented its statutory scheme as written, it would satisfy patients\u27 rights to treatment. tion of community-based services. If New Hampshire implemented its statutory scheme as written, it would satisfy patients\u27 rights to treatment
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