Connecting Child Health and School Readiness

Describes research, practices, and policy options for integrating efforts to enhance child health and school readiness by ensuring child health care; linking child health, early learning, early intervention and family support; and improving environments

Improving Child Health Care Through Federal Policy: An Emerging Opportunity

Summarizes legislative proposals introduced in 2007 to track primary care outcomes in Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP) and focus on strengthening primary, preventive, and developmental child health services and research

Philanthropy, Advocacy, Vulnerable Children, and Federal Policy: Three Essays on a New Era of Opportunity

Presents essays on the potential for a greater role for philanthropy and child advocacy in shaping federal policy, linking government services and community initiative, and gaps in child advocacy investment. Outlines strategies and challenges

PolicyMatters: Reshaping the Advocacy Direction on Poverty Reduction

This essay provides an overview of two different but potentially complementary approaches to poverty reduction: "community-building and social justice pathways to community vitality" and "work pathways to economic self-sufficiency." It then discusses the role of advocacy in developing policies that can support these approaches

Issue Brief: Connecting Child Health and School Readiness

This Issue Brief, authored by Charles Bruner, PhD, Executive Director of the Child and Family Policy Center, highlights how the health system can help to improve children's healthy development and school readiness, and how policies can help ensure that young children receive preventive and developmental health care

Children's Healthy Mental Development: What State Policymakers Need to Know

Research shows that experiences in the earliest years of life affect lifelong health outcomes and that those early years are full of opportunities to strengthen healthy physical and mental development.1,2This issue brief offers policymakers an action checklist for developing state policies and practices that support the healthy mental development of young children, and provides examples of such policies and practices already in place in Colorado. As well, the brief lists federal funding available to bolster state and local efforts to improve children's healthy mental development

Village Building and School Readiness: Closing Opportunity Gaps in a Diverse Society

Examines a community's impacts on child development and frames strategies to build early learning systems in poor minority neighborhoods. Stresses combining services with community-building and developing a diverse early education workforce from within

Improving School Readiness Outcomes: Lessons From Six Communities

Describes efforts in California, Florida, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia to develop early learning systems for school readiness, using federal and state resources. Includes common themes that emerged from these six case studies

Validation of a Predictive Model for Survival in Patients With Advanced Cancer: Secondary Analysis of RTOG 9714.

BackgroundThe objective of this study was to validate a simple predictive model for survival of patients with advanced cancer.MethodsPrevious studies with training and validation datasets developed a model predicting survival of patients referred for palliative radiotherapy using three readily available factors: primary cancer site, site of metastases and Karnofsky performance score (KPS). This predictive model was used in the current study, where each factor was assigned a value proportional to its prognostic weight and the sum of the weighted scores for each patient was survival prediction score (SPS). Patients were also classified according to their number of risk factors (NRF). Three risk groups were established. The Radiation Therapy and Oncology Group (RTOG) 9714 data was used to provide an additional external validation set comprised of patients treated among multiple institutions with appropriate statistical tests.ResultsThe RTOG external validation set comprised of 908 patients treated at 66 different radiation facilities from 1998 to 2002. The SPS method classified all patients into the low-risk group. Based on the NRF, two distinct risk groups with significantly different survival estimates were identified. The ability to predict survival was similar to that of the training and previous validation datasets for both the SPS and NRF methods.ConclusionsThe three variable NRF model is preferred because of its relative simplicity

Image Compression for Geological Mapping and Novelty Detection

We describe an image-comparison technique of Heidemann and Ritter [4,5] that uses image compression, and is capable of: (i) detecting novel textures in a series of images, as well as of: (ii) alerting the user to the similarity of a new image to a previously-observed texture. This image-comparison technique has been implemented and tested using our Astrobiology Phone-cam system, which employs Bluetooth communication to send images to a local laptop server in the field for the image-compression analysis. We tested the system in a field site displaying a heterogeneous suite of sandstones, limestones, mudstones and coalbeds. Some of the rocks are partly covered with lichen. The imagematching procedure of this system performed very well with data obtained through our field test, grouping all images of yellow lichens together and grouping all images of a coal bed together, and giving a 91% accuracy for similarity detection. Such similarity detection could be employed to make maps of different geological units. The novelty-detection performance of our system was also rather good (a 64% accuracy). Such novelty detection may become valuable in searching for new geological units, which could be of astrobiological interest. By providing more advanced capabilities for similarity detection and novelty detection, this image-compression technique could be useful in giving more scientific autonomy to robotic planetary rovers, and in assisting human astronauts in their geological exploration