The IRS\u27 Classification Settlement Program: Is it an Adequate Tool to Relieve Taxpayer Burden for Small Businesses that have Misclassified Workers as Independent Contractors

This Note argues that the timely filing of informational tax forms should not be a condition of an IRS Classification Settlement Program (CSP) settlement offer; the CSP should incorporate more settlement options; and the CSP should make settlement offers mandatory. Part II of this Note will discuss the legal history behind worker classification. Part III will demonstrate the unique situation of the small business owner in classifying workers. Part IV will explain § 530, a safe harbor provision for small business owners who have incorrectly classified workers. Part V will introduce the CSP in detail and explain its applications. Part VI will highlight the shortcomings of the CSP. Part VII will discuss possible solutions to CSP shortcomings. Part VII will conclude

The IRS\u27 Classification Settlement Program: Is it an Adequate Tool to Relieve Taxpayer Burden for Small Businesses that have Misclassified Workers as Independent Contractors

This Note argues that the timely filing of informational tax forms should not be a condition of an IRS Classification Settlement Program (CSP) settlement offer; the CSP should incorporate more settlement options; and the CSP should make settlement offers mandatory. Part II of this Note will discuss the legal history behind worker classification. Part III will demonstrate the unique situation of the small business owner in classifying workers. Part IV will explain § 530, a safe harbor provision for small business owners who have incorrectly classified workers. Part V will introduce the CSP in detail and explain its applications. Part VI will highlight the shortcomings of the CSP. Part VII will discuss possible solutions to CSP shortcomings. Part VII will conclude

Monte Carlo Calculations of Electron Emission at Surface Edges

A Monte Carlo method using Mott cross-sections for elastic scattering and a modification of the Bethe continuous-slowing-down by inelastic scattering at inner- shell electrons has been used to calculate linescans across surface edges and steps using a two-detector system for SE and BSE with exit momenta to the right (detector A) and to the left (detector B). The step height h=10R, R, R/2, R/5 and R/10 (R = electron range) and the inclination angles =30°- 80° of edges and steps have been varied to get information about the influence of these quantities on the linescans. The signals contain contributions by surface tilt contrast, electron diffusion contrast, self-shadowing of the specimen and \u27mutual illumination\u27 caused by backscattered electrons re-entering the specimen. The latter results in a larger increase of the signal for an extended step relative to a surface edge with the same angle The difference signals A-B contain information about the surface profile. The SE A-B signal is in first order proportional to tan and the BSE A-B signal is proportional to sin where denotes the local surface tilt angle. Reconstructions of the surface profile using the calculated signals show the errors caused by signal contributions different to pure surface tilt contrast

Effect of workplace- versus home-based physical exercise on pain in healthcare workers:study protocol for a single blinded cluster randomized controlled trial

BACKGROUND: The prevalence and consequences of musculoskeletal pain is considerable among healthcare workers, allegedly due to high physical work demands of healthcare work. Previous investigations have shown promising results of physical exercise for relieving pain among different occupational groups, but the question remains whether such physical exercise should be performed at the workplace or conducted as home-based exercise. Performing physical exercise at the workplace together with colleagues may be more motivating for some employees and thus increase adherence. On the other hand, physical exercise performed during working hours at the workplace may be costly for the employers in terms of time spend. Thus, it seems relevant to compare the efficacy of workplace- versus home-based training on musculoskeletal pain. This study is intended to investigate the effect of workplace-based versus home-based physical exercise on musculoskeletal pain among healthcare workers. METHODS/DESIGN: This study was designed as a cluster randomized controlled trial performed at 3 hospitals in Copenhagen, Denmark. Clusters are hospital departments and hospital units. Cluster randomization was chosen to increase adherence and avoid contamination between interventions. Two hundred healthcare workers from 18 departments located at three different hospitals is allocated to 10 weeks of 1) workplace based physical exercise performed during working hours (using kettlebells, elastic bands and exercise balls) for 5 × 10 minutes per week and up to 5 group-based coaching sessions, or 2) home based physical exercise performed during leisure time (using elastic bands and body weight exercises) for 5 × 10 minutes per week. Both intervention groups will also receive ergonomic instructions on patient handling and use of lifting aides etc. Inclusion criteria are female healthcare workers working at a hospital. Average pain intensity (VAS scale 0-10) of the back, neck and shoulder (primary outcome) and physical exertion during work, social capital and work ability (secondary outcomes) is assessed at baseline and 10-week follow-up. Further, postural balance and mechanical muscle function is assessed during clinical examination at baseline and follow-up. DISCUSSION: This cluster randomized trial will investigate the change in self-rated average pain intensity in the back, neck and shoulder after either 10 weeks of physical exercise at the workplace or at home. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT01921764)

Directly Imaging Rocky Planets from the Ground

Over the past three decades instruments on the ground and in space have discovered thousands of planets outside the solar system. These observations have given rise to an astonishingly detailed picture of the demographics of short-period planets, but are incomplete at longer periods where both the sensitivity of transit surveys and radial velocity signals plummet. Even more glaring is that the spectra of planets discovered with these indirect methods are either inaccessible (radial velocity detections) or only available for a small subclass of transiting planets with thick, clear atmospheres. Direct detection can be used to discover and characterize the atmospheres of planets at intermediate and wide separations, including non-transiting exoplanets. Today, a small number of exoplanets have been directly imaged, but they represent only a rare class of young, self-luminous super-Jovian-mass objects orbiting tens to hundreds of AU from their host stars. Atmospheric characterization of planets in the <5 AU regime, where radial velocity (RV) surveys have revealed an abundance of other worlds, is technically feasible with 30-m class apertures in combination with an advanced AO system, coronagraph, and suite of spectrometers and imagers. There is a vast range of unexplored science accessible through astrometry, photometry, and spectroscopy of rocky planets, ice giants, and gas giants. In this whitepaper we will focus on one of the most ambitious science goals --- detecting for the first time habitable-zone rocky (<1.6 R_Earth) exoplanets in reflected light around nearby M-dwarfsComment: 8 pages, 1 figure, Astro2020 Science White Pape

Learning to Trust: Understanding Editorial Authority and Trust in Recommender Systems for Education

Trust in a recommendation system (RS) is often algorithmically incorporated using implicit or explicit feedback of user-perceived trustworthy social neighbors, and evaluated using user-reported trustworthiness of recommended items. However, real-life recommendation settings can feature group disparities in trust, power, and prerogatives. Our study examines a complementary view of trust which relies on the editorial power relationships and attitudes of all stakeholders in the RS application domain. We devise a simple, first-principles metric of editorial authority, i.e., user preferences for recommendation sourcing, veto power, and incorporating user feedback, such that one RS user group confers trust upon another by ceding or assigning editorial authority. In a mixed-methods study at Virginia Tech, we surveyed faculty, teaching assistants, and students about their preferences of editorial authority, and hypothesis-tested its relationship with trust in algorithms for a hypothetical `Suggested Readings' RS. We discover that higher RS editorial authority assigned to students is linked to the relative trust the course staff allocates to RS algorithm and students. We also observe that course staff favors higher control for the RS algorithm in sourcing and updating the recommendations long-term. Using content analysis, we discuss frequent staff-recommended student editorial roles and highlight their frequent rationales, such as perceived expertise, scaling the learning environment, professional curriculum needs, and learner disengagement. We argue that our analyses highlight critical user preferences to help detect editorial power asymmetry and identify RS use-cases for supporting teaching and researchComment: (UMAP '21) Proceedings of the 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, June 21 - 25, 2021 (Utrecht, the Netherlands

The Capstone Fair for Promoting Initial Generation of Occupational Therapy Doctoral Capstone Ideas

Entry-level occupational therapy doctorate (OTD) programs across the United States navigate the challenge of designing doctoral capstone (DC) processes to provide students with adequate scaffolding to plan, implement, evaluate, and disseminate their capstone projects. The DC process starts with the daunting tasks of student generation of capstone interests and connecting with mentors for collaborative guidance. The purpose of this program evaluation project was to assess a comprehensive process, known as the Capstone Fair, for effectively and efficiently facilitating students’ initial generation of capstone ideas and the match between student and Faculty Capstone Mentor. A fixed convergent, parallel mixed methods design was used to evaluate the Capstone Fair’s ability to meet pre-established criteria among two student cohorts, four years apart. Outcomes indicated 100% (n=101) alignment of the student’s identified capstone topics with the program’s curriculum design; interests that demonstrated cognitive flexibility and feasibility in 96% (n=97) of students; a statistically significant increase in student confidence with the identification of interests (p\u3c.001) and level of interest in ideas generated (p\u3c.001); high student satisfaction with the process (M=4.26/5.0); high connectivity of initial interests with final executed projects in 67% (n=33) of projects; and a time commitment for student/faculty mentor matching of 2.5 hours with 4% post-match adjustments. The results suggest that the Capstone Fair procedures were effective for student generation of capstone interests that were curricularly aligned and demonstrate flexibility and feasibility for responding to the evolving dynamics of the DC process over time

Reorganize your blogs: Supporting blog re-visitation with natural language processing and visualization

Temporally-connected personal blogs contain voluminous textual content, presenting challenges in re-visiting and reflecting on experiences. Other data repositories have benefited from natural language processing (NLP) and interactive visualizations (VIS) to support exploration, but little is known about how these techniques could be used with blogs to present experiences and support multimodal interaction with blogs, particularly for authors. This paper presents the effect of reorganization—reorganizing the large blog set with NLP and presenting abstract topics with VIS—to support novel re-visitation experiences to blogs. The BlogCloud tool, a blog re-visitation tool that reorganizes blog paragraphs around user-searched keywords, implements reorganization and similarity-based content grouping. Through a public use session with bloggers who wrote about extended hikes, we observed the effect of NLP-based reorganization in delivering novel re-visitation experiences. Findings suggest that the re-presented topics provide new reflection materials and re-visitation paths, enabling interaction with symbolic items in memory