Strategic Assessment of the State of the Science in Research on Employment for Individuals with Disabilities

This report provides a systematic review of recent research (primarily since 2002) related to employment of people with disabilities. It also identifies limitations and gaps in this research. The report reviews research in a variety of areas including supply-side factors influencing employment, employer attitudes and practices, labor market organization, work accommodations, progression of disability benefits and disability management, impact of public policy on employment, and vocational services interventions

Project scheduling under undertainty – survey and research potentials.

The vast majority of the research efforts in project scheduling assume complete information about the scheduling problem to be solved and a static deterministic environment within which the pre-computed baseline schedule will be executed. However, in the real world, project activities are subject to considerable uncertainty, that is gradually resolved during project execution. In this survey we review the fundamental approaches for scheduling under uncertainty: reactive scheduling, stochastic project scheduling, stochastic GERT network scheduling, fuzzy project scheduling, robust (proactive) scheduling and sensitivity analysis. We discuss the potentials of these approaches for scheduling projects under uncertainty.Management; Project management; Robustness; Scheduling; Stability;

Trade Union Membership and Dismissals

In Germany, there is no trade union membership wage premium, while the membership fee amounts to 1% of the gross wage. Therefore, prima facie, there are strong incentives to free-ride on the benefits of trade unionism. We establish empirical evidence for a private gain from trade union membership which has hitherto not been documented: in West Germany, union members are less likely to lose their jobs than non-members. In particular, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel we can show that roughly 50% of the observed raw differential in individual dismissal rates can be explained by the estimated average partial effect of union membership.dismissal, free-riding, trade union membership, survey data

Speech Communication

Contains reports on three research projects.U. S. Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories under Contract F19628-69-C-0044National Institutes of Health (Grant 5 RO1 NS04332-09)M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory Purchase Order CC-57

Epistolarity, Anticipation, and Revolution in Clara Howard

In the critical hierarchy of Charles Brockden Brown\u27s six published novels, Clara Howard has traditionally ranked dead last. While Brown\u27s four socalled major novels have long been redeemed from aesthetic disdain and continue to receive increasing attention and acclaim, his last two novels are routinely bracketed off from this earlier work and described in derisive and dismissive terms, when they have not been ignored completely. Critics, moreover, seem to agree that of these two late epistolary romances, both published in 1801, Clara Howard is worse even than Jane Talbot.1 From Mary Shelley\u27s 1814 remark that Clara Howard is very stupid to Norman Grabo\u27s 1981 characterization of it as all breakdown; the only things left to collapse are the characters and our interest. And they do, critics have virtually delighted in condemning the book.

A tutorial on interactive Markov chains

Interactive Markov chains (IMCs) constitute a powerful sto- chastic model that extends both continuous-time Markov chains and labelled transition systems. IMCs enable a wide range of modelling and analysis techniques and serve as a semantic model for many industrial and scientific formalisms, such as AADL, GSPNs and many more. Applications cover various engineering contexts ranging from industrial system-on-chip manufacturing to satellite designs. We present a survey of the state-of-the-art in modelling and analysis of IMCs.\ud We cover a set of techniques that can be utilised for compositional modelling, state space generation and reduction, and model checking. The significance of the presented material and corresponding tools is highlighted through multiple case studies

Achieving Reliable Coordination of Residential Plug-in Electric Vehicle Charging: A Pilot Study

Wide-scale electrification of the transportation sector will require careful planning and coordination with the power grid. Left unmanaged, uncoordinated charging of electric vehicles (EVs) at increased levels of penetration will amplify existing peak loads, potentially outstripping the grid's capacity to reliably meet demand. In this paper, we report findings from the OptimizEV Project - a real-world pilot study in Upstate New York exploring a novel approach to coordinated residential EV charging. The proposed coordination mechanism seeks to harness the latent flexibility in EV charging by offering EV owners monetary incentives to delay the time required to charge their EVs. Each time an EV owner initiates a charging session, they specify how long they intend to leave their vehicle plugged in by selecting from a menu of deadlines that offers lower electricity prices the longer they're willing to delay the time required to charge their EV. Given a collection of active charging requests, a smart charging system dynamically optimizes the power being drawn by each EV in real time to minimize strain on the grid, while ensuring that each customer's car is fully charged by its deadline. Under the proposed incentive mechanism, we find that customers are frequently willing to engage in optimized charging sessions, allowing the system to delay the completion of their charging requests by more than eight hours on average. Using the flexibility provided by customers, the smart charging system was shown to be highly effective in shifting the majority of EV charging loads off-peak to fill the night-time valley of the aggregate load curve. Customer opt-in rates remained stable over the span of the study, providing empirical evidence in support of the proposed coordination mechanism as a potentially viable "non-wires alternative" to meet the increased demand for electricity driven growing EV adoption.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figure

Statistical Rate Event Analysis with Elite Sample Selection Scheme

Accurately estimating the failure region of rare events for memory-cell and analog circuit blocks under process variations is a challenging task. As the first part of the thesis, author propose a new statistical method, called EliteScope to estimate the circuit failure rates in rare event regions and to provide conditions of parameters to achieve targeted per- formance. The new method is based on the iterative blockade framework to reduce the number of samples. But it consists of two new techniques to improve existing methods. First, the new approach employs an elite learning sample selection scheme, which can con- sider the effectiveness of samples and well-coverage for the parameter space. As a result, it can reduce additional simulation costs by pruning less effective samples while keeping the accuracy of failure estimation. Second, the EliteScope identifies the failure regions in terms of parameter spaces to provide a good design guidance to accomplish the performance target. It applies variance based feature selection to find the dominant parameters and then determine the in-spec boundaries of those parameters. We demonstrate the advantage of our proposed method using several memory and analog circuits with different number of process parameters. Experiments on four circuit examples show that EliteScope achieves a significant improvement on failure region estimation in terms of accuracy and simulation cost over traditional approaches. The 16-bit 6T-SRAM column example also demonstrate that the new method is scalable for handling large problems with large number of process variables

Parametric Identification of Temporal Properties

Given a dense-time real-valued signal and a parameterized temporal logic formula with both magnitude and timing parameters, we compute the subset of the parameter space that renders the formula satisfied by the trace. We provide two preliminary implementations, one which follows the exact semantics and attempts to compute the validity domain by quantifier elimination in linear arithmetics and one which conducts adaptive search in the parameter space