Portland Public Schools: From Data and Decisions to Implementation and Results on Dropout Prevention

Many school district leaders, particularly those in urban areas, struggle to reduce dropout rates, but find themselves overwhelmed by the dimensions of the problem. There are, however, a few districts making notable progress towards reducing the number of dropouts and ensuring that students earn high school diplomas in a timely manner.One of these is the Portland, Oregon, Public Schools (PPS). In the course of a single calendar year (2007-2008) PPS began to have a positive impact in addressing its dropout problem. How? The key was gathering data that illuminated the true scope of the problem, identifying predictive indicators to spot high risk students, and then marshalling teachers, administrators and support services to focus on those individual students entering 9th grade who were at the highest risk of dropping out of high school

Research Brief: Job-Mobility for People with Disabilities: Impact of Employer-Paid Health Insurance

As most employers appear to make decisions to offer EHI from an economic perspective, research has yet to demonstrate how such decisions could potentially contribute to higher turnover rates as indicated by job-mobility of workers, especially among employees with disabilities. This research brief describes the results from the analysis of large national survey data examining the relationship between employer-paid health insurance and the likelihood of job-change for people with and without disabilities

From data to decisions: Navigating the “So What?” and “What’s Next?” conversation around nearshore data

Ever wonder what happens to all those data being collected? In Island County, we are fortunate to be the focus of a plethora of data collection efforts. We have comprehensive nearshore assessments that describe where our habitats are and how those habitats are built. We have habitat assessments that are a collaborative effort between citizen science groups and state agencies. We have long-term status and trends data sets on intertidal habitats and presence for a few specific species. We have a high resolution shoreline armor dataset and we have a predictive probability model for coastal flood risk. But what do we do with all of these data? What kind of information can be extrapolated from all this hard work? Most importantly, how is it helping us make a difference to our nearshore management? Island County’s Department of Natural Resources is working with our partners and committees to utilize this information to help guide and inform their decisions. We are finding that there are two broad categories of data sets – those that are most useful in informing decisions and those that are most useful in communication and outreach. We will discuss which sets fall into which category, and how we are working to evolve our datasets into useful next steps

Trust in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

In traditional Pedestrian Automatic Emergency Braking (PAEB) system, vehicles equipped with onboard sensors such as radar, camera, and infrared detect pedestrians, alert the driver and/ or automatically take actions to prevent vehicle-pedestrian collision. In some situations, a vehicle may not be able to detect a pedestrian due to blind spots. Such a vehicle could benefit from the sensor data from neighboring vehicles in making such safety critical decisions. We propose a trust model for ensuring shared data are valid and trustworthy for use in making safety critical decisions. Simulation results of the proposed trust model show promise