State TANF Policy and Services to People With Disabilities

The intent of this study is to identify state policies and procedures that are designed to ensurethat people with disabilities and/or parents with children with disabilities are provided theopportunity to participate in state TANF programs. The intent is not to present "best practices," with quantifiable and measurable outcomes. Many state TANF programs are still in their early stages, with new programs being developed and outcomes still uncertain. The intent is to present an in-depth "snapshot" of what is occurring right now at the state level in terms of services and programs designed to assist TANF recipients with disabilities. Are states developing programs and policies specifically targeted toward people with disabilities? Are people with disabilities being served on an individual basis as part of the overall TANF population? Are states developing innovative strategies that particularly benefit TANF recipients with disabilities and, if so, what are they? By identifying these strategies, this report may assist other states in their policy development process in support of people with disabilities and parents with children of disabilities

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: Welfare Waivers

[Excerpt] The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it is willing to waive certain federal work participation standards under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant to permit states to experiment with “alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.” The work participation standards are numerical performance standards that each state must meet or risk being penalized through a reduction in its block grant. These are standards that apply to the states, not directly to individuals, though they may influence how states design their welfare-to-work programs. Such waivers will be the first “new” waivers to test welfare-to-work strategies in more than 15 years. The waiver initiative would permit states that undertake an alternative welfare-to-work strategy to assess their programs using measures different from those in the current standards. HHS announced this policy through the release of an Information Memorandum on July 12, 2012. State requests for waivers will have to be approved by HHS and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and meet specified criteria. Under the 1996 law that created TANF, states had the authority to operate programs created under waivers of pre-1996 welfare law until their scheduled expiration. The last such waiver expired in 2007. Additionally, the Administration of President George W. Bush made a legislative proposal to create new “superwaiver” authority that would, among other things, have allowed for the waiver of the federal TANF work participation standards. That proposal passed the House three times between 2002 and 2005. A scaled-back version of this proposal was reported from the Senate Finance Committee, but not approved by the full Senate, twice during that period. This report discusses • the current TANF work participation standards; • the HHS initiative to waive TANF work participation standards; • pre-1996 welfare waivers, including how they were treated under TANF; and • the “superwaiver” proposal. This report is not a legal analysis of the Secretary’s authority to waive TANF work participation standards. Rather, it describes and provides context for this HHS initiative

Work Sanctions Under Welfare Reform: Are They Helping Women Achieve Self-Sufficiency?

The focus of this thesis has been to determine the usable voltage range of carbon-based supercapacitors (SC). Supercapacitors are a relatively new type of capacitors with a vast increase in capacitance compared to capacitors which utilize a dielectric as charge separator. A SC consists of two electrodes and an electrolyte separating the electrodes. The charges are stored by electrostatic forces in the interface between the electrode and the electrolyte, forming the so called electrochemical double-layer (EDL). With porous electrodes the effective surface area of the interfacial zone can be made very large, giving SCs a large storage capacity. The limiting factors of a SC is the decomposition potential of the electrolyte and the decomposition of the electrodes. For commercially manufactured SCs the electrolyte is usually an organic solvent, which has a decomposition potential of up to 2.7-2.8 V. Compared to aqueous electrolytes with a thermodynamic limit of 1.23 V. The drawback of using non-aqueous electrolytes is that they are not environmentally friendly, and they increase the production cost. It is claimed that the voltage range can be up to 1.9 V using aqueous electrolytes. Some researchers have focused on aqueous electrolytes for these reasons. In this thesis two different electrolytes were tested to determine if the voltage range could be extended. The experiments were conducted using a three electrode cell and performing cyclic voltammogram measurements (CV). The carbon electrodes were made of  two different sources of grahite, battery graphite or exfoliated graphite, and nano fibrilated cellulose was added to increase the mechanical stability. The results show that the oxidation potential of the carbon electrode was the positive limit. A usable potential of about 1 V was shown. However, when cycling the electrodes to potentials below the decomposition limit, for hydrogen evolution, interesting effects were seen. A decrease in reaction kinetics, indicating a type of conditioning of the electrode was observed. An increase in charge storage capacitance was also observed when comparing the initial measurements with the final, probably corresponding to an increase in porosity.KEPS projekt Sundsvall Mitt Universite

The Economics of Policies and Programs Affecting the Employment of People with Disabilities

Over the last several decades, there has been a movement toward the inclusion of people with disabilities in mainstream social institutions. The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which supports the full participation of people with disabilities in society and mainstream institutions, illustrates the shift in attitudes toward people with disabilities. Rather than being perceived as having a social or medical problem, individuals with disabilities are increasingly viewed as people with challenges that can be solved if appropriate policies and supports are available for addressing them

The New Writs of Assistance

The providers of network services (and the makers of network devices) know an enormous amount about our lives. Because they do, these network intermediaries are being asked with increasing frequency to assist the government in solving crimes or gathering intelligence. Given how much they know about us, if the government can secure the assistance of these intermediaries, it will enjoy a huge increase in its theoretical capacity for surveillance—the ability to learn almost anything about anyone. This has the potential to create serious social harm, even assuming that the government continues to adhere to ordinary democratic norms and the rule of law. One possible solution to this problem is for network intermediaries to refuse government requests for aid and attempt to sustain those refusals in court. Although this proposal has received an enormous amount of attention, there is substantial cause for skepticism about how well it can work. Congress has given the government wide authority to demand information and assistance through tools like subpoenas, the Stored Communications Act, and Title III. Even when the government does not have specific statutory authorization, courts have interpreted the All Writs Act to authorize a great deal of open-ended aid, consistent with the well-settled Anglo-American history of third-party assistance in law enforcement. It is also far from unheard of for the executive to read restrictions on its surveillance authority narrowly, and its own inherent powers broadly, to engage in surveillance that is quasi- or extra-legal. A superior (or at least complementary) response to the problem is to restrict network intermediaries themselves by limiting how much they can learn about us and how long they can retain it. This approach treats enhanced state surveillance as a problem created by the intermediaries’ stockpiling of data, and proposes to solve it at the root—which would, as a useful side effect, solve a number of other problems created by that stockpiling, too

Evaluation of the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP)

Older workers -- defined as those over the age of 55 -- account for an ever-increasing segment of the American labor force. As they grow in numbers, however, older workers are also particularly vulnerable to job dislocation, in part because rapid economic globalization has eliminated millions of jobs in manufacturing and other traditional fields of employment.Older workers are also becoming a growing share of the long-term and very long-term unemployed, a trend that started before the recent recession and has steadily advanced. Between 2007 and 2011, the proportion of unemployed workers over 50 who were jobless for six months or more jumped from 24 percent to 54 percent. Against this backdrop, the assistance offered by the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP) is of particularly timely importance. SCSEP was established in 1965 and incorporated under the Older Americans Act (OAA) in 1973. Operated by the U.S. Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration (ETA), SCSEP provides subsidized minimum-wage, part-time community service assignments for low-income persons age 55 or older who would otherwise have poor employment prospects. Over its 46-year history, SCSEP has responded to the fact that older workers tend to have more difficulty than younger workers in finding new jobs when they become unemployed because of their greater likelihood as a group to have lower levels of formal education and obsolete skills, and because many employers hold negative stereotypes of older workers

To Attach or Not To Attach: The Continued Confusion Regarding Search Warrants and the Incorporation of Supporting Documents

The Fourth Amendment mandates that a search warrant particularly describe what is to be searched or seized. Courts have allowed officers to use supporting documentation, such as affidavits and other attachments, to define, but not expand, the limits of a search. However, the use of these supporting documents creates a problem when the document is referenced in the warrant but is not physically attached to the warrant. This Note argues that the protection of the Fourth Amendment is not the warrant itself, but the guarantee that a warrant, fully detailing the search to be undertaken, has been approved by a neutral magistrate

Unlocking the Fifth Amendment: Passwords and Encrypted Devices

Each year, law enforcement seizes thousands of electronic devices—smartphones, laptops, and notebooks—that it cannot open without the suspect’s password. Without this password, the information on the device sits completely scrambled behind a wall of encryption. Sometimes agents will be able to obtain the information by hacking, discovering copies of data on the cloud, or obtaining the password voluntarily from the suspects themselves. But when they cannot, may the government compel suspects to disclose or enter their password? This Article considers the Fifth Amendment protection against compelled disclosures of passwords—a question that has split and confused courts. It measures this right against the legal right of law enforcement, armed with a warrant, to search the device that it has validly seized. Encryption cases present the unique hybrid scenario that link and entangle the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. In a sense, this Article explores whose rights should prevail. This Article proposes a novel settlement that draws upon the best aspects of Fourth and Fifth Amendment law: the government can compel a suspect to decrypt only those files it already knows she possesses. This rule follows from existing Fifth Amendment case law and, as a corollary to the fundamental nature of strong encryption, also represents the best accommodation of law enforcement needs against individual privacy

Fostering Success for People Facing Barriers to Employment through SNAP Employment and Training:Promising Employment Program Models, Practices, and Principles for SNAP E&T Participants Facing Barriers to Employment

This brief provides information and resources about best and promising employment program models, practices, and principles for serving people facing significant barriers to employment in order to inform SNAP Employment & Training (E&T) state planning, partnerships, and implementation