Protecting Workers and Their Families With Paid Family Leave and Caregiving Credits

Calls for equal access to paid job-protected family leave for women, which would enable them to return to the workforce and boost their lifetime earnings, and for Social Security credits for unpaid family caregivers who leave the workforce temporarily

A Guide to Implementing Paid Family Leave - Lessons From California

Describes California's Paid Family Leave program and outlines key lessons from the legislative process and implementation in five areas: outreach and education, administration, employer issues, policy issues, and research, evaluation, and data collection

Prosperity Threatened: Perspectives on Childhood Poverty in California

By the official measure, 6.1 million Californians are living in poverty -- more than at any point since the US Census started tracking state poverty. California has the highest sheer number of people living in poverty of any state in the nation and is ranked 20th among all states in terms of the percentage of its population living in official poverty. Yet, even more alarming, using the Supplementary Poverty Measure (SPM) developed by the Census Bureau, the poverty rate in California vaults to the first in the nation at 23.5 percent. Only Hawaii and the District of Columbia come close to matching the rate of poverty in the state. On closer inspection, the situation becomes grimmer: California's children are by far the biggest victims of increased poverty. More than one in five children in California lives in poverty; nearly half live either in poverty or perilously close to it. And, in a surprising twist, children live in poverty at twice the rate of seniors in the state. This is concerning not only due to the immediate effects of income deprivation, such as decreased health outcomes, but also because poverty is mobile across generations. According to a recent study from Columbia University's National Center for Children in poverty, 45 percent of people who spent half their childhoods in poverty were also poor as adults

Are Dual-Method Messages Undermining STI/HIV Prevention?

Adolescent girls and young women who are at risk for unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection (STI), including HIV, are frequently counseled to use a hormonal contraceptive to protect against the former and condoms to protect against the latter, for exampe, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 2011. The present paper reviews the literature on multiple risk messages, compliance with this dual-use recommendation, predictors of dual use, and interventions developed to encourage dual use. Data indicate that simultaneous use of these two methods is not common, and that efforts to encourage dual use have not yielded promising results. An alternative is to recommend condom use alone, since condoms protect very well against STI and HIV, and quite well against pregnancy when used consistently and correctly. The availability of emergency contraception is relevant here. Research utilizing a randomized controlled trial is recommended

The Promise of the Affordable Care Act, the Practical Realities of Implementation: Maintaining Health Coverage During Life Transitions

Recommends policy options for outreach, education, and automatic application to ensure that all Americans can maintain coverage in the event of unemployment, divorce, early retirement, or other life transitions through health insurance exchanges

Harmonic analysis of lossy piezoelectric composite transducers using the plane wave expansion method

Periodic composite ultrasonic transducers oer many advantages but the periodic pillar architecture can give rise to unwanted modes of vibration which interfere with the piston like motion of the fundamental thickness mode. In this paper, viscoelastic loss is incorporated into a three dimensional plane wave expansion model (PWE) of these transducers. A comparison with experimental and nite element data is conducted and a design to damp out these lateral modes is investigated. Scaling and regularisation techniques are introduced to the PWE method to reduceill-conditioning in the large matrices which can arise. The identication of the modes of vibration is aided by examining proles of the displacements, electrical potentialand Poynting vector. The dispersive behaviour of a 2-2 composite transducer with high shear attenuation in the passive phase is examined. The model shows thatthe use of a high shear attenuation ller material improves the frequency band gap surrounding the fundamental thickness mode

Analysis of ultrasonic transducers with fractal architecture

Ultrasonic transducers composed of a periodic piezoelectric composite are generally accepted as the design of choice in many applications. Their architecture is normally very regular and this is due to manufacturing constraints rather than performance optimisation. Many of these manufacturing restrictions no longer hold due to new production methods such as computer controlled, laser cutting, and so there is now freedom to investigate new types of geometry. In this paper, the plane wave expansion model is utilised to investigate the behaviour of a transducer with a self-similar architecture. The Cantor set is utilised to design a 2-2 conguration, and a 1-3 conguration is investigated with a Sierpinski Carpet geometry

Researching Recognition of Prior Learning; the significance of assessor’s values and beliefs within the Totally Pedagogised Society

[EN] This research is exploring the values and beliefs of academic assessors around Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) in order to better understand their mindset and provide a foundation for best practice informed by all actors. An interpretative research design and random stratified sampling allowed for 31 interviews with assessors in an institute of technology setting in Ireland. Bernstein’s theories of classification and framing of knowledge and the related ideas of power and control provided the conceptual framework for analysis of the data. The notion of assessors as actors within the totally pedagogised society also supported analysis. Two themes emerge from the data. The first relates to the primary values and beliefs of assessors around RPL that are related to defending the standards of the formal learning system. The second theme balancing, diverges from this and provides further understanding of positions taken with the assessment of RPL. The research concludes that practitioner networks are necessary to cultivate pedagogic agency for RPL through both the official and pedagogic recontextualisation fieldsO'leary, P.; Ledwith, A. (2016). Researching Recognition of Prior Learning; the significance of assessor’s values and beliefs within the Totally Pedagogised Society. En 2nd. International conference on higher education advances (HEAD'16). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 35-42. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD16.2015.2492OCS354