The impact on child developmental status at 12 months of volunteer home-visiting support

Home-visiting support during pregnancy or soon after the birth of an infant can be advantageous for maternal well being and infant development. The best results have been identified when home-visitors are professionals, especially nurses, and if a theoretically driven curriculum is followed with fidelity. Some suggest that disadvantaged families, who may avoid professional services, respond well to support from community volunteers but there is less evidence about their impact. This study identified potentially vulnerable mothers during pregnancy in randomly allocated neighbourhoods where local volunteer home-visiting schemes agreed to offered proactive volunteer support and control areas where the local home-visiting schemes did not offer this proactive service. Taking demographic, child and family factors into account there were no significant differences in infant cognitive development at 12 months of age between families who had been supported by a volunteer and those who had not. Better cognitive development was predicted by less reported parenting stress when infants were 2 months and a more stimulating and responsive home environment at 12 months. The results suggest that unstructured proactive volunteer support for potentially vulnerable families is not likely to enhance infant development. Limitations of the cluster randomised design are discussed

Proactive SLA negotiation for service based systems: Initial implementation and evaluation experience

This paper describes a framework that we have developed to integrate proactive SLA negotiation with dynamic service discovery to provide cohesive runtime support for both these activities. The proactive negotiation of SLAs as part of service discovery is necessary for reducing the extent of interruptions during the operation of a service based system when the need for replacing services in it arises. The developed framework discovers alternative candidate constituent services for a service client application, and negotiates/agrees but does not activate SLAs with these services until the need for using a service becomes necessary. A prototype tool has been implemented to realize the framework. This prototype is discussed in the paper along with the results of the initial evaluation of the framework

A Change in the Frame: From Absenteeism to Attendance

School attendance is important for student long-term academic and career success. However, in the U.S., our current practice often disenfranchises more at-risk students than it helps. Students slated for suspension and expulsion are often recipients of these practices. This manuscript offers a recommended change in how we frame student absenteeism and attendance using attendance markers and conceptual information by identifying the discrepancies, proposing options, and recommending a new way to actively leverage attendance data (not absenteeism data) for proactive student support. Particular attention is paid to how excused and unexcused absences and in-school suspensions are treated. An emerging pivot program, the Evaluation and Support Program, engages students while they receive school services, community support, and complete consequences is discussed as a possible, promising intervention

Commissioner’s Planning Guidance, 2013

As technology evolves, vital resources shift, and the state’s population diversifies, Public Safety will have a unique opportunity to show our integrity, values, and worth to the citizens of Iowa. To take advantage of this unique moment in history, and will remain committed to, proactive and on-going strategic mapping. This strategic work will always be guided by Public Safety’s mission and core values, as well as by our responsibility to support local Police Departments and Sheriff’s Offices

Sustaining proactive motivation for non-mandatory professional development building self-determined employees

This dissertation examined the motivations energising employees' participation in non-mandatory professional development (PD) provided within their work organisation using a proactive motivation framework (Parker, Bindl, & Strauss, 2010) and a Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985) perspective. Two studies were conducted using a mixed-method design. Study 1 was conducted in a specific organisation and involved both quantitative and qualitative data. Both aspects of this study informed the development of the quantitative Study 2 conducted in an organisation non-specific sample. The quantitative aspect of both Study 1 and Study 2 provided support for a structural model of employees‟ motivation to participate in non-mandatory PD within their work organisation as a proactive, self-determined process that includes transfer implementation intentions as a pre-participation commitment toward change and readiness to transfer what is learned. Study 1 demonstrated that employees' Transfer Implementation Intentions were energised by autonomous motivation for participation in non-mandatory PD and the intrinsic benefits envisioned from participation. As an organisational context variable, positive work environment directly influenced each aspect of the model. From the Study 1 qualitative findings it was concluded that organisational commitment to employee development, useful to job, useful to career, and prosocial benefits were important variables to include in the structural model tested in Study 2. Study 2 demonstrated that employees‟ transfer implementation intentions were influenced by both intrinsic benefits and prosocial benefits. Autonomous motivation demonstrated only an indirect influence on transfer implementation intentions. An organisational commitment to development influenced employees‟ perceptions of useful to career and useful to job. Useful to job influenced autonomous motivation and prosocial benefits, while useful to career influenced intrinsic benefits. Together, the results of the two studies highlight the importance of autonomous motivation, intrinsic and prosocial goals, and the provision of organisational support to facilitate employees‟ proactive involvement in non-mandatory PD and their intention to transfer what is learned. These influences are important, as participation and the use of what is learned are paramount to the success of non-mandatory PD activities (Goldstein & Ford, 2002)

The adoption and use of Through-life Engineering Services within UK Manufacturing Organisations

Manufacturing organisations seek ever more innovative approaches in order to maintain and improve their competitive position within the global market. One such initiative that is gaining significance is ‘through-life engineering services’. These seek to adopt ‘whole life’ service support through the greater understanding of component and system performance driven by knowledge gained from maintenance, repair and overhaul activities. This research presents the findings of exploratory research based on a survey of UK manufacturers who provide through-life engineering services. The survey findings illustrate significant issues to be addressed within the field before the concept becomes widely accepted. These include a more proactive approach to maintenance activities based on real-time responses; standardisation of data content, structure, collection, storage and retrieval protocols in support of maintenance; the development of clear definitions, ontologies and a taxonomy of through-life engineering services in support of the service delivery system; lack of understanding of component and system performance due to the presence of ‘No Fault Found’ events that skew maintenance metrics and the increased use of radio-frequency identification technology in support of maintenance data acquisition

Efficient Micro-Mobility using Intra-domain Multicast-based Mechanisms (M&M)

One of the most important metrics in the design of IP mobility protocols is the handover performance. The current Mobile IP (MIP) standard has been shown to exhibit poor handover performance. Most other work attempts to modify MIP to slightly improve its efficiency, while others propose complex techniques to replace MIP. Rather than taking these approaches, we instead propose a new architecture for providing efficient and smooth handover, while being able to co-exist and inter-operate with other technologies. Specifically, we propose an intra-domain multicast-based mobility architecture, where a visiting mobile is assigned a multicast address to use while moving within a domain. Efficient handover is achieved using standard multicast join/prune mechanisms. Two approaches are proposed and contrasted. The first introduces the concept proxy-based mobility, while the other uses algorithmic mapping to obtain the multicast address of visiting mobiles. We show that the algorithmic mapping approach has several advantages over the proxy approach, and provide mechanisms to support it. Network simulation (using NS-2) is used to evaluate our scheme and compare it to other routing-based micro-mobility schemes - CIP and HAWAII. The proactive handover results show that both M&M and CIP shows low handoff delay and packet reordering depth as compared to HAWAII. The reason for M&M's comparable performance with CIP is that both use bi-cast in proactive handover. The M&M, however, handles multiple border routers in a domain, where CIP fails. We also provide a handover algorithm leveraging the proactive path setup capability of M&M, which is expected to outperform CIP in case of reactive handover.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure