Building Quality Improvement Systems: Lessons from Three Emerging Efforts in the Youth-Serving Sector

Quality is fast becoming a policy priority in states and localities around the country. As a result, formal and informal networks of youth organizations are seeking and developing strategies to help them assess and improve performance. This report takes a close look at efforts underway in three networks and provides a preliminary framework for thinking about key questions when planning any kind of program quality improvement work in the youth-serving sector

Measuring Youth Program Quality: A Guide to Assessment Tools

Thanks to growing interest in the subject of youth program quality, many tools are now available to help organizations and systems assess and improve quality. Given the size and diversity of the youth-serving sector, it is unrealistic to expect that any one tool or process will fit all programs or circumstances. This report compares the purpose, history, structure, methodology, content and technical properties of nine different program observation tools

Building Citywide Systems for Quality: A Guide and Case Studies for Afterschool Leaders

This guide is intended to help cities strengthen and sustain quality afterschool programs by using an emerging practice known as a quality improvement system (QIS). The guide explains how to start building a QIS or how to further develop existing efforts and features case studies of six communities' QIS

Pay It Forward: Guidance for Mentoring Junior Scholars

Based on interviews with William T. Grant Scholars Program mentors and mentees in the social, behavioral, and health sciences, explores building mentoring relationships, mentoring across differences, supporting career development, and managing conflict

Groundwater Dynamics in a Tidal Salt Marsh: A Combined Field and Modeling Study North Inlet, Georgetown, South Carolina

2008 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Addressing Water Challenges Facing the State and Regio

Groundwater Recharge Rates in Isolated and Riverine Wetlands: Influencing Factors

2014 S.C. Water Resources Conference - Informing Strategic Water Planning to Address Natural Resource, Community and Economic Challenge

Linking Signatures of Accretion with Magnetic Field Measurements - Line Profiles are not Significantly Different in Magnetic and Non-Magnetic Herbig Ae/Be Stars

Herbig Ae/Be stars are young, pre-main-sequence stars that sample the transition in structure and evolution between low- and high-mass stars, providing a key test of accretion processes in higher-mass stars. Few Herbig Ae/Be stars have detected magnetic fields, calling into question whether the magnetospheric accretion paradigm developed for low-mass stars can be scaled to higher masses. We present He I 10830 \AA\ line profiles for 64 Herbig Ae/Be stars with a magnetic field measurement in order to test magnetospheric accretion in the physical regime where its efficacy remains uncertain. Of the 5 stars with a magnetic field detection, 1 shows redshifted absorption, indicative of infall, and 2 show blueshifted absorption, tracing mass outflow. The fraction of redshifted and blueshifted absorption profiles in the non-magnetic Herbig Ae/Be stars is remarkably similar, suggesting that the stellar magnetic field does not affect gas kinematics traced by He I 10830 \AA. Line profile morphology does not correlate with the luminosity, rotation rate, mass accretion rate, or disk inclination. Only the detection of a magnetic field and a nearly face-on disk inclination show a correlation (albeit for few sources). This provides further evidence for weaker dipoles and more complex field topologies as stars develop a radiative envelope. The small number of magnetic Herbig Ae/Be stars has already called into question whether magnetospheric accretion can be scaled to higher masses; accretion signatures are not substantially different in magnetic Herbig Ae/Be stars, casting further doubt that they accrete in the same manner as classical T Tauri stars.Comment: accepted to ApJ; 17 pages, 4 figures, 3 table

Perspectives on credit scoring and fair mortgage lending: article two

Credit scoring systems ; Mortgages

Using heat as a tracer to estimate the depth of rapid porewater advection below the sediment–water interface

SummaryRapid exchange of surface waters and porewaters in shallow sediments has important biogeochemical implications for streams and marine systems alike, but mapping these important reaction zones has been difficult. As a means of bridging the gap between the stream and submarine groundwater discharge communities we suggest that the rapid, transient mixing in this zone be called “hydrodynamic exchange”. We then present a new model, MATTSI, which was developed to estimate the timing, depth and magnitude of hydrodynamic exchange below the sediment–water interface by inverting thermal time-series observations. The model uses an effective thermal dispersion term to emulate 3-D hydrodynamic exchange in a 1-D model. The effective dispersion is assumed to decline exponentially below the sediment water interface. Application of the model to a synthetic dataset and two field datasets from 50km offshore in the South Atlantic Bight shows that exchange events can be clearly identified from thermal data. The model is relatively insensitive to realistic errors in sensor depth and thermal conductivity. Although the datasets tested here were too shallow to fully span the depth of flushing, we were able to estimate the depth of hydrodynamic exchange via sensitivity studies