The Impact of Placing Adolescent Males into Foster Care on their Education, Income Assistance and Incarcerations

Understanding the causal impacts of taking youth on the margins of risk into foster care is an element of the evidence-base on which policy development for this crucial function of government relies. Yet, there is little research looking at these causal impacts; neither is there much empirical work looking at long-term outcomes. This paper focuses on estimating the impact of placing 16 to 18 year old male youth into care on their rates of high school graduation, and post-majority income assistance receipt and incarceration. Two distinct sources of exogenous variation are used to generate instrumental variables, the estimates from which are interpreted in a heterogeneous treatment effects framework as local average treatment effects (LATEs). And, indeed, each source of exogenous variation is observed to estimate different parameters. While both instruments are in accord in that placement in foster care reduces (or delays) high school graduation, the impact of taking youth into care on income assistance use has dramatically different magnitudes across the two margins explored, and, perhaps surprisingly, one source of exogenous variation causes an increase, and the other a decrease, in the likelihood of the youth being incarcerated by age 20. Our results suggest that it is not enough to ask whether more or fewer children should be taken into care; rather, which children are, and how they are, taken into care matter for long-term outcomes.foster care, local average treatment effects

Middle Eastern Americans and Social Welfare

This issue brief focuses on the relationship between Americans of Middle Eastern decent and social welfare, primarily as indicated by country of origin, education, and socioeconomic status. This brief considers the vast number of countries Middle Easterners come from and the complexities of their different cultures and languages in easing the assimilation process for immigrants, as well as accessing social welfare programs

Towards Minimizing the Delay/Non-completion Rate of Research Master’s Degree in Ghana: ESL Students’ Perspective of the Challenges of Thesis Work

Extant literature confirms that the delay and non-completion of the thesis component of postgraduate studies remain a bane of postgraduate education. With the current spate of interest and enrolment into postgraduate studies in Ghana, and globally, it has become imperative to investigate the phenomenon and spotlight the contributing factors to the delay and non-completion of thesis so that students, supervisors, postgraduate faculties and departments, and all relevant stakeholders could pull efforts together to mitigate it. Through the purposive sampling method, the study recruited ten postgraduate students who have had varied experiences with thesis writing and are at different stages of completion. The data collection instrument was semi-structured interview. The conceptual framework adopted for the study was the Jiranck Dissertation Research Completion model (2010) and the data were analysed using the thematic analysis. The findings of the study revealed that three factors contribute to the delay and non-completion of thesis. These are; student-related factors, supervisor-related factors and institution-related factors. Based on the findings, it was recommended that postgraduate research institutions should design and develop plans and strategies to help their students complete the thesis within the stipulated period

The Asian red seaweed Grateloupia turuturu (Rhodophyta) invades the Gulf of Maine

We report the invasion of the Gulf of Maine, in the northwest Atlantic Ocean, by the largest red seaweed in the world, the Asian Grateloupia turuturu. First detected in 1994 in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, south of Cape Cod, this alga had expanded its range in the following years only over to Long Island and into Long Island Sound. In July 2007 we found Grateloupia in the Cape Cod Canal and as far north (east) as Boston, Massachusetts, establishing its presence in the Gulf of Maine. Grateloupia can be invasive and may be capable of disrupting low intertidal and shallow subtidal seaweeds. The plant\u27s broad physiological tolerances suggest that it will be able to expand possibly as far north as the Bay of Fundy. We predict its continued spread in North America and around the world, noting that its arrival in the major international port of Boston may now launch G. turuturu on to new global shipping corridors

In search of the frog’s tail : investigating the time course of conceptual knowledge activation

Slot-filling theories of conceptual combination assume that both constituent concepts are activated before they are combined. However, these theories have difficulty in explaining why combined phrase features are sometimes more available than the features of the constituent nouns. In this study, we investigate the time course of conceptual knowledge activation. Using three verification tasks of varying complexity we demonstrate that basic taxonomic knowledge is retrieved more quickly than modal specific conceptual features. Applying this finding to conceptual combination, we demonstrate that participants take longer to reject combinations requiring the activation of instance specific features (e.g. frog tail) than those that can be rejected based on more generalized taxonomic knowledge (e.g. daffodil tail). These findings provide convergent evidence that conceptual knowledge is activated dynamically and selectively rather than all at once. We discuss the implications for existing theories

The Intersection Between the LGBT Population and Party Affiliation

This issue brief discusses how the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender population aligns with each major political party. It also outlines the main LGBT organizations of the Democratic and Republican parties and LGBT voting trends in the most recent elections

Factors Influencing the Interpretation of Noun-Noun Compounds

The Competition Among Relation in Nominals theory (Gagné & Shoben, 1997) asserts that the relation frequency of the modifying noun is the primary determinant of ease of interpretation for noun-noun compounds. It also assumes that the influence of this variable is independent of the head noun. However, we suggest that both constituents exert an influence and that this influence depends on the pairing of nouns as well as the context. We present an experiment that investigates if the influence of the modifier’s relation frequency is fixed or whether it is affected by the head noun. Our results reveal that modifier relation frequency per se is not an accurate predictor of ease of interpretation: low modifier relation frequency combinations were easily interpreted in cases where the modifier’s general bias was overruled by the semantics of the head noun. As a result, we suggest that models predicting ease of interpretation must take into account the interaction of both constituents. The implications for models of conceptual combination are discussed

Stiffness response of bone to elevated frequency loading

Introduction: Wolff’s Law qualitatively describes the response of bone to loading conditions. This study examines the interaction and dependence of loading frequency on the fatigue response of bone under axial load. It has been surmised that exposure to elevated frequencies may increase bone stiffness. The resulting stiffness response of bone based on work generated under sinusoidal loading over a range of frequencies was investigated. -Elucidating the response characteristics of bone will help to determine the optimal loading conditions which stimulate bone growth and may be applicable to the improvement of bone fusion regimens as well as design of bioreactor systems. Materials and Methods: A 10-mm trephine was used to extract the central core from 30 frozen thoracic (T9, T10, T11) porcine vertebral bodies (Animal Technologies Inc., Tyler, Texas). The resulting heights from each of the cylindrical specimens of cancellous bone were recorded and used to normalize the resulting deformation data under loading. Cylindrical specimens were milled to achieve parallel surfaces for loading in phosphate-buffered saline. Specimens were subjected to compressive sinusoidal fatigue loading from –2 N to –15 N for 535 cycles at randomly selected rates of 1 Hz, 2.5 Hz, 5 Hz, 7.5 Hz, and 10 Hz using a materials’ testing machine with continuous load versus deformation data acquired at cycle number 10 and at subsequent 25 cycle intervals thereafter. Stiffness at recorded cycle intervals was computed from the elastic region of the load versus deformation curve. At each axial count, the stiffness of the loading phase of the cycle was computed by determining the slope of the load versus deformation curve in the elastic region. A plot of the mean stiffness versus cycle number at each loading frequency tested was subjected to a nonlinear analysis (Prism 5.0, GraphPad Inc., San Diego, California). The resulting curve parameters of rate (K), plateau, stiffness change (span), and half-time were normalized to initial stiffness (Y0) and statistically analyzed using a one-way repeated measures ANOVA test with a Tukey posthoc test. Results and Discussion: The results of compression based on applied loading frequency are provided. The resonant frequency of the spine has been cited at 5 Hz. In addition to this 5 Hz resonant frequency, harmonics at 1 Hz and 10 Hz were also found to increase cycles required to achieve stability, as demonstrated by statistically increased half-life values seen at these loading rates. Among the half-life values, no statistically significant differences were found between the 1 Hz and 5 Hz, 1 Hz and 10 Hz, or 5 Hz and 10 Hz frequencies. All other comparisons were statistically significant (P \u3c 0.05). Conclusions: The mechanical response of bone is highly dependent on loading frequency. This study demonstrates that increased stiffness at elevated loading frequencies may lead to predisposition of pathological clinical conditions. Frequency of loading rate should be considered as stiffness changes display preferential values near 2.5 Hz, 5 Hz, and 10 Hz

A Computational Model of Conceptual Combination

We describe the Interactional-Constraint (ICON) model of conceptual combination. This model is based on the idea that combinations are interpreted by incrementally constraining the range of interpretation according to the interacting influence of both constituent nouns. ICON consists of a series of discrete stages, combining data from the British National Corpus, the WordNet lexicon and the Web to predict the dominant interpretation of a combination and a range of factors relating to ease of interpretation. One of the major advantages of the model is that it does not require a tailored knowledge base, thus broadening its scope and utility. We evaluate ICON’s reliability and find that it is accurate in predicting word senses and relations for a wide variety of combinations. However, its ability to predict ease of interpretation is poor. The implications for models of conceptual combination are discussed