Maximizing Health Care Reform for New York's Immigrants

As New York State works to implement health reform, key opportunities exist to expand coverage options for immigrants. This NYSHealth-supported report, written by the New York Immigration Coalition in conjunction with Empire Justice Center, presents the choices New York State policymakers will need to make to preserve and promote immigrants' access to health care coverage and to mitigate disparities between citizens and noncitizens in health care.The report emphasizes the options in areas in which states have a high degree of flexibility, including eligibility classifications; documentation and verification policies and practices; marketing and outreach; and oversight and monitoring. It also includes recommendations for ensuring access to care for those immigrants who will remain uninsured even after health reform is implemented. Among the report's recommendations:Shape the State's eligibility classification to ensure the broadest possible inclusion of immigrants under the Affordable Care Act. Currently, immigration status definitions, and eligibility for public benefits, vary by federal and state program rules. The report recommends the cases in which New York can apply the more expansive eligibility standards.Develop mechanisms for verifying citizenship and immigration status while protecting confidentiality and due process. Enrollment into public insurance programs and the Health Benefit Exchange will require verification and documentation of status. The report recommends specific options for verification that also maintain privacy.Conduct tailored, active outreach and marketing to engage immigrants and enroll them in health insurance coverage programs. Given the tremendous racial, ethnic, cultural, and language diversity of the State's residents, a range of tailored approaches can meet the unique needs of immigrant communities.Secure the safety net and charity care programs. Undocumented immigrants and some others will remain uninsured even after health reform is implemented, so the safety-net system of care will remain important to New York State's health care infrastructure

Fast and compact self-stabilizing verification, computation, and fault detection of an MST

This paper demonstrates the usefulness of distributed local verification of proofs, as a tool for the design of self-stabilizing algorithms.In particular, it introduces a somewhat generalized notion of distributed local proofs, and utilizes it for improving the time complexity significantly, while maintaining space optimality. As a result, we show that optimizing the memory size carries at most a small cost in terms of time, in the context of Minimum Spanning Tree (MST). That is, we present algorithms that are both time and space efficient for both constructing an MST and for verifying it.This involves several parts that may be considered contributions in themselves.First, we generalize the notion of local proofs, trading off the time complexity for memory efficiency. This adds a dimension to the study of distributed local proofs, which has been gaining attention recently. Specifically, we design a (self-stabilizing) proof labeling scheme which is memory optimal (i.e., $O(\log n)$ bits per node), and whose time complexity is $O(\log ^2 n)$ in synchronous networks, or $O(\Delta \log ^3 n)$ time in asynchronous ones, where $\Delta$ is the maximum degree of nodes. This answers an open problem posed by Awerbuch and Varghese (FOCS 1991). We also show that $\Omega(\log n)$ time is necessary, even in synchronous networks. Another property is that if $f$ faults occurred, then, within the requireddetection time above, they are detected by some node in the $O(f\log n)$ locality of each of the faults.Second, we show how to enhance a known transformer that makes input/output algorithms self-stabilizing. It now takes as input an efficient construction algorithm and an efficient self-stabilizing proof labeling scheme, and produces an efficient self-stabilizing algorithm. When used for MST, the transformer produces a memory optimal self-stabilizing algorithm, whose time complexity, namely, $O(n)$, is significantly better even than that of previous algorithms. (The time complexity of previous MST algorithms that used $\Omega(\log^2 n)$ memory bits per node was $O(n^2)$, and the time for optimal space algorithms was $O(n|E|)$.) Inherited from our proof labelling scheme, our self-stabilising MST construction algorithm also has the following two properties: (1) if faults occur after the construction ended, then they are detected by some nodes within $O(\log ^2 n)$ time in synchronous networks, or within $O(\Delta \log ^3 n)$ time in asynchronous ones, and (2) if $f$ faults occurred, then, within the required detection time above, they are detected within the $O(f\log n)$ locality of each of the faults. We also show how to improve the above two properties, at the expense of some increase in the memory

Home Energy Consumption Feedback: A User Survey

Buildings account for a relevant fraction of the energy consumed by a country, up to 20-40% of the yearly energy consumption. If only electricity is considered, the fraction is even bigger, reaching around 73% of the total electricity consumption, equally divided into residential and commercial dwellings. Building and Home Automation have a potential to profoundly impact current and future buildings' energy efficiency by informing users about their current consumption patterns, by suggesting more efficient behaviors, and by pro-actively changing/modifying user actions for reducing the associated energy wastes. In this paper we investigate the capability of an automated home to automatically, and timely, inform users about energy consumption, by harvesting opinions of residential inhabitants on energy feedback interfaces. We report here the results of an on-line survey, involving nearly a thousand participants, about feedback mechanisms suggested by the research community, with the goal of understanding what feedback is felt by home inhabitants easier to understand, more likely to be used, and more effective in promoting behavior changes. Contextually, we also collect and distill users' attitude towards in-home energy displays and their preferred locations, gathering useful insights on user-driven design of more effective in-home energy display

Identities and Interactions in a Transcultural Online Collaboration Project

The traditional theoretical frameworks and assumptions about intercultural technical communication are no longer adequate to describe and teach intercultural communication now frequently happening through digital networks. My dissertation proposes to use the theory of cosmopolitanism as it has been recently applied in several social science fields as a framework for pedagogical project design in order to teach intercultural communication skills applicable in the global age. The dissertation describes a transcultural online pedagogical project between Hungarian and U.S. students that I designed according to the principles of cosmopolitan theory. In this project, students were introduced to the basic tenets of cosmopolitanism and were asked to create blogs about themselves and their varied identities and languages. Students were also asked to comment on the blogs written by students in the other country. For this dissertation, I analyzed the blogs and comments created during the project to find out how students represented their identities and interacted with each other in this online learning environment. Students’ identity representations are discussed within the framework of Burke and Stets’ identity theory. The categories of student identity, sports identity, and national identity are examined in detail by applying discourse analysis with the purpose of identifying structures of expectations as delineated by Tannen. In addition, students’ rhetorical strategies in the comment section that follow the principles of cosmopolitan communication are also described. Based on the findings of this research, I conclude the dissertation by proposing a model for the cosmopolitan communication process in this globally networked learning space that is not only applicable to similar projects but can also inform the process of transforming the teaching of transcultural technical communication making it more applicable to the increasingly global and digital workplace

Culture & Competition - A study of Supplementary Education in Taiwan.

Abstract The phenomenon of supplementary education is a major part of the educational landscape of Taiwan and other countries of East Asia. The scale and characterization of this phenomenon is not clear, despite its major position in the educational system of Taiwan. The aim of this thesis is to describe the scale and character of supplementary education in Taiwan, particularly at the level of Elementary School, and further to investigate what motivates Taiwanese Elementary school age children and their parents to enroll in supplementary education activities. The research further attempts to explore how these findings reflect on possible cultural differences in motivation in education. In order to adequately account for cultural aspects of the motivations and perceptions of parents and students, the research uses a combination of interview and survey methods, involving Taiwanese elementary school teachers, parents of elementary school children, and university students, concerning their experience and observations of the phenomenon of supplementary education in a city located in southern Taiwan. The findings confirm the large scale of supplementary education activity from early in elementary school, with a majority of students reporting participation. Interviews and surveys revealed a wide range of reasons for the uptake of supplementary education, and support the conclusion that the level of participation is appreciably dependent on cultural factors which tend to magnify the competitive aspects of the education system. While teachers described distorting effects of supplementary education, students also offered some positive perceptions of supplementary education, particularly in English language learning. The study also included a survey of achievement goal orientation, with the 2x2 achievement goal construct accounting for less variance than in the original US sample, raising questions concerning cultural differences in motivation. Implications for educators and education policy are discussed, and suggestions for further research are also offered

A Practical Guide To Measuring and Managing Impact

The Practical Guide is a comprehensive resource that distills best practice in impact measurement into five easy-to-understand steps and provides practical tips and recommendations for how to implement impact measurement at the level of the social investor and in the social sector organisations that they support