Financial management in a joint field environment

MBA Professional ReportThis MBA professional report highlights the FM challenges that comptroller's encounter in the joint field environment, identifies sources of payment inefficiencies and recommends solutions to reduce those inefficiencies, thus addressing the issue of improving foreign contract payments by comptrollers in the field. Problem disbursements during Operation Desert Storm yielded $54 million dollars in mismanaged funds for the U.S. Army alone. With the continued emphasis on joint operations, the comptroller must effectively manage funds obligated to various Department of Defense (DoD) activities. The research involved in this endeavor includes doctrine and policy review, interviews with various DoD comptrollers and a case study of exercise Cobra Gold 2002 budget execution and contractual payments at the joint organization level. Cobra Gold is an excellent example of a large-scale joint and combined operation in a foreign country; it provides a great opportunity to analyze the research question. This professional report concludes that field comptrollers cannot adequately meet fiscal responsibilities without comparable garrison IT connectivity and recommends that all of the U.S. services procure systems that are fully interoperable to best support the warfighter. This report is primarily intended for field comptrollers with limited joint field experience to make them aware of the uniqueness that exists in joint operations.http://archive.org/details/financialmanagem109459910Captain, United States Marine CorpsLieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Alignment of the Challenger Center Curriculum with the Washington State Essential Learning Requirements and the Use of Multiple Intelligences

The State ofWashington has recently adopted a set oflearning standards called the Essential Academic Learning Requirements. It is the intention of this Master\u27s project to align the learning objectives of the Challenger Center curriculum with the Essential Academic Learning Requirements for Science, so that it may be used as a sixth and seventh grade enrichment opportunity. Itis also within the scope of this project to include Gardner\u27s theory on multiple intelligence as an educational tool to improve student learning. It will be suggested that with the use of multiple intelligences and the integration of informal science learning experiences, students will develop improved problem solving skills and knowledge retention. This in turn may improve the overall performance on the State assessment for the new standards

The Effects of the Orff Approach on Language Acquisition for Spanish Foreign Language Students

Despite the abundance of literature that supports music education connecting to language learning, limited research evaluates the effectiveness of elementary music methodologies, such as the Orff approach, in helping foreign language students in their language learning. The Orff approach develops musicianship in every student through music, movement, speech, and drama. Guided by Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, the researcher implemented a quasi-experimental research study to measure the language fluency of 100 elementary students participating in general music and learning Spanish as a foreign language. The researcher placed half of the students in the treatment group exploring the Orff approach in general music and half in the control group in music appreciation. After completing a Spanish pretest and participating in the two-month intervention, both groups are assessed via the Spanish Student Growth Objective (SGO) halfway benchmark. Scores reflect students’ listening, speaking, reading, and writing abilities. This work provides evidence of the effects of the Orff approach on language acquisition. It allows readers to ascertain the potential connections between the brain regions responsible for language learning and those responsible for developing musicianship. Such a study is groundbreaking because it can inspire the development of professional learning communities among the arts and language departments and promote further cross-curricular connections to music. Furthermore, this study can encourage further research as scholars can test various general music methodologies and successful acquisition of other target or foreign languages

Mentoring Former Prisoners: A Guide for Reentry Programs

Few social programs have attempted to provide high-risk adults -- and, particularly, former prisoners -- with mentors. And thus there are few resources that offer practical advice and recommendations for mentoring this population, given its distinct needs, assets and challenges. While much remains to be tested and learned, this manual draws on the experience of the 11 sites involved in P/PV'sReady4Work prisoner reentry demonstration, as well as established best practices in the mentoring field, to provide guidelines for practitioners who are interested in developing a mentoring program to support former prisoners and enhance the effectiveness of other reentry services, such as employment and case management services.The guide was originally published by the US Department of Labor in November 2007 under the title Mentoring Ex-Prisoners: A Guide for Prisoner Reentry Programs. However, because of growing interest in establishing mentoring programs as part of larger reentry efforts around the country, P/PV decided to reissue the guide, along with updated information related to P/PV's evaluation of Ready4Work (particularly findings published in Mentoring Formerly Incarcerated Adults, 2009.

Knowledge as Culture

Culture must not be seen as something that merely reflects an organization’s social reality: rather, it is an integral part of the process by which that reality is constructed. Knowledge management initiatives, per se, are not culture change projects; but, if culture stands in the way of what an organization needs to do, they must somehow impact

Effective Organizational Practices for Middle and High School Grades

At the request of the Accountability Review Council, Research for Action identified effective organizational practices used by better performing schools serving substantial numbers of low income middle and high school students in the School District of Philadelphia. These practices are organized into three spheres: Conditions for Teaching, Student-Centered School Community, and Instructional Program. For each sphere, the report offers broad strategies and specific practices to enact the strategies. Nuanced school case studies show how the practices can work synergistically and coherently in schools to help students succeed

Ranking docking poses by graph matching of protein–ligand interactions: lessons learned from the D3R Grand Challenge 2

International audienceA novel docking challenge has been set by the Drug Design Data Resource (D3R) in order to predict the pose and affinity ranking of a set of Farnesoid X receptor (FXR) agonists, prior to the public release of their bound X-ray structures and potencies. In a first phase, 36 agonists were docked to 26 Protein Data Bank (PDB) structures of the FXR receptor, and next rescored using the in-house developed GRIM method. GRIM aligns protein–ligand interaction patterns of docked poses to those of available PDB templates for the target protein, and rescore poses by a graph matching method. In agreement with results obtained during the previous 2015 docking challenge, we clearly show that GRIM rescoring improves the overall quality of top-ranked poses by prioritizing interaction patterns already visited in the PDB. Importantly, this challenge enables us to refine the applicability domain of the method by better defining the conditions of its success. We notably show that rescoring apolar ligands in hydrophobic pockets leads to frequent GRIM failures. In the second phase, 102 FXR agonists were ranked by decreasing affinity according to the Gibbs free energy of the corresponding GRIM-selected poses, computed by the HYDE scoring function. Interestingly, this fast and simple rescoring scheme provided the third most accurate ranking method among 57 contributions. Although the obtained ranking is still unsuitable for hit to lead optimization, the GRIM–HYDE scoring scheme is accurate and fast enough to post-process virtual screening dat

Vulnerability : a view from different disciplines

Practitioners from different disciplines use different meanings and concepts of vulnerability, which, in turn, have led to diverse methods of measuring it. This paper presents a selective review of the literature from several disciplines to examine how they define and measure vulnerability. The disciplines include economics, sociology/anthropology, disaster management, environmental science, and health/nutrition. Differences between the disciplines can be explained by their tendency to focus on different components of risk, household responses to risk and welfare outcomes. In general, they focus either on the risks (at one extreme) or the underlying conditions (or outcomes) at the other. Trade-offs exist between simple measurement schemes and rich conceptual understanding.Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Economic Theory&Research,Rural Poverty Reduction

Building capacity in climate change policy analysis and negotiation: methods and technologies

Capacity building is often cited as the reason “we cannot just pour money into developing countries” and why so many development projects fail because their design does not address local conditions. It is therefore a key technical and political concept in international development. Some of the poorest countries in the world are also some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Their vulnerability is in part due to a lack of capacity to plan and anticipate the effects of climate change on crops, water resources, urban electricity demand etc. What capacities do these countries lack to deal with climate change? How will they cope? What steps can they take to reduce their vulnerability? This innovative and high-profile research project was part of a larger project (called C3D) and conducted with non-governmental organisations in Senegal, South Africa and Sri Lanka. The research involved several participatory workshops and a questionnaire to all three research centres