Color Red

A young veteran gets a call from Special Forces to come back to the Vietnam War. Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit

The Economic Impacts of Native American Gaming in Wisconsin

An input-output model is utilized to assesses the economic impact of gambling in Native American casinos in Wisconsin. Important facts include interview information from 697 players. Positive economic gains discovered for local casino areas are offset by losses to other parts of the state and by losses due to social costs

Building a Learning Agenda Around Disconnected Youth

In December 2007, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave MDRC a grant to conduct reconnaissance on promising strategies to reengage disconnected young people and improve their long-term outcomes. The primary objective of the grant was to identify key leverage points for future investment by government and foundations. MDRC consulted with researchers and policy experts, reviewed the results of completed and ongoing evaluations of youth programs, visited a number of innovative youth programs and cities with strong youth strategies, and hosted a meeting of youth practitioners. The goal of the paper's recommendations is to develop a menu of approaches for the heterogeneous population of disconnected youth--analogous in some ways to the multiple pathways that are being developed for high school students. The recommendations fall into two broad categories: building knowledge about mature, existing programs (to better understand whether they work, for whom, and why) and investment in developing and/or scaling up new programs that address areas of unmet need, such as efforts to restructure General Educational Development (GED) preparation programs so that they are more tightly linked with postsecondary programs, both occupational and academic; new "leg-up" strategies for older youth with very low basic skill levels, for whom a GED may not be a realistic goal; and new strategies to engage young people who are more profoundly disconnected and unlikely to volunteer for youth programs

Tracking changes in everyday experiences of disability and disability sport within the context of the 2012 London Paralympics

The 2012 Paralympics was the biggest ever, the most accessible and best attended in its 64-year history. The Paralympics and ideas of disability associated with the Games provide significant opportunity for reflection on how far societal opinions, attitudes and behaviour have changed regarding disability. In 2012 – the first ever “legacy games” – an explicit aim of the Paralympics was to “transform the perception of disabled people in society”, (Channel 4), and use sport to contribute to “a better world for all people with a disability” (IPC 2011). The 2012 Games therefore came with a social agenda: to challenge the current perceptions many people have about disability and disability sport. Within this report – commissioned by the UK’s Paralympic broadcaster, Channel 4 – we consider everyday experiences of disability and disability sport within the context of the London 2012 Paralympics and televised coverage of the Games. The analysis is based 140 in-depth interviews that took place in the UK over a period of eighteen months, during the lead up to, and immediately after, the Games: between January 2011 and September 2012. Embedded in the lifeworld of our participants, we ask whether the 2012 Paralympics was successful in changing perceptions of disability

SR-IOV in High Performance Computing

No abstract availabl

Multi-Shot Processing For Better Velocity Determination

We perform a technique called multi-shot processing on a section of 12-channel sonic logs in order to better resolve compressional and shear velocities. The data are from the ODP Leg 102 cruise, which occupied drill site 418A near the Bermuda Rise in 1985. Multi-shot processing has been done on a 9 meter section of this data, using different combinations of numbers of shots vs. numbers of receivers in an attempt to compare the vertical resolution and stability of this processing method. The method is stable only with certain shot-to-receiver subarray combinations. This paper demonstrates that the optimum combinations using this set of data are 4 shots with 6 receivers apiece, and 3 shots with 8 receivers each. While a combination using 5 shots with 4 receivers is possible, the method produces spurious results. This may be because of spatial aliasing over too few receivers, or it may be a result of poor outside control over the entire experiment (ship heave, etc.). It is hoped that an optimum subarray combination can be used to resolve velocities over shorter array lengths using the redundancy in the sonic data. This would result in a greater ability to characterize fracturing and alteration in the oceanic crust, since velocity variations have been shown to correlate with fracture zones.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Full Waveform Acoustic Logging ConsortiumNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant OCE89-00316

Lessons Learned: James B. Lockhart III

Insights from discussions with James B. Lockhart III, who was the Director (CEO) and Chairman of the Oversight Board of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) upon the agency’s creation on July 30, 2008. Topics include the conservatorships of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as other elements of the Bush Administration\u27s 2008 crisis response activities

The relative efficiency of time-to-progression and continuous measures of cognition in presymptomatic Alzheimer's disease.

IntroductionClinical trials on preclinical Alzheimer's disease are challenging because of the slow rate of disease progression. We use a simulation study to demonstrate that models of repeated cognitive assessments detect treatment effects more efficiently than models of time to progression.MethodsMultivariate continuous data are simulated from a Bayesian joint mixed-effects model fit to data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. Simulated progression events are algorithmically derived from the continuous assessments using a random forest model fit to the same data.ResultsWe find that power is approximately doubled with models of repeated continuous outcomes compared with the time-to-progression analysis. The simulations also demonstrate that a plausible informative missing data pattern can induce a bias that inflates treatment effects, yet 5% type I error is maintained.DiscussionGiven the relative inefficiency of time to progression, it should be avoided as a primary analysis approach in clinical trials of preclinical Alzheimer's disease