The Benefits and Costs of Head Start

In this essay we review what is known about Head Start and argue that the program is likely to generate benefits to participants and society as a whole that are large enough to justify the program's costs. Our conclusions differ importantly from those offered in some previous reviews because we use a more appropriate standard to judge the success of Head Start (namely, benefit-cost analysis), draw on new accumulating evidence for Head Start's long-term effects on early cohorts of program participants, and discuss why common interpretations of a recent randomized experimental evaluation of Head Start's short-term impacts may be overly pessimistic. While in principle there could be more beneficial ways of deploying Head Start resources, the benefits of such changes remain uncertain and there is some downside risk.

Bringing Scenario Planning Home to KU

Energized by the immersive learning process at the ARL scenario-planning workshop in March 2011, the University of Kansas (KU) Libraries decided to introduce scenario planning to library staff later that spring, to support development of a new strategic plan. This article reviews the implementation of the ARL planning tool and the outcomes of the process at KU

Scenario Planning: Developing a Strategic Agenda for Organizational Alignment

This article describes the use and principles of scenario planning as a critical tool to effectively address the complex and uncertain environments in higher education. It looks specifically at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) scenario-planning project "Envisioning Research Library Futures: A Scenario Thinking Project

Task Force on Digital Directions in the Humanities

This report was prepared with assistance by Ann Cudd, Kristine Latta and members of the task force.Recommendations of a task force formed by KU Libraries, the Hall Center for the Humanities, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to fund an institute for digital humanities research.KU Libraries; Hall Center for the Humanities; College of Liberal Arts and Science

The Scholarly Digital Initiatives Program at the University of Kansas: A Campus-wide Collaboration

Presentation given April 30, 2005 at EndUser 2005, Endeavor Users Group Meeting, Chicago, IL.The University of Kansas Scholarly Digital Initiatives program is building a rich set of digital tools and resources accessed through a common digital library system and integrated with other campus central systems including the University portal and course management systems. This presentation describes the current digital environment and Libraries/IT collaboration. The audience will learn how the University of Kansas has positioned its digital initiatives program on campus, and how the program is planning, constructing, and integrating digital systems and services provided by Digital Initiatives. We address how Endeavor products, including Voyager, ENCompass, and LinkFinderPlus fit into the existing architecture and how we envision future positioning of our systems and services

Libraries and IT: are we there yet?

Special Issue on Library and IT Mergers. Article URL (requested by publisher) to final published version: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/00907320710774247Purpose – This study aims to look at the impact for users on university library and information technology services, present and future, following merger. Design/methodology/approach – The study examined user survey data from the early 1990s through the 2006 LibQUAL survey, collected information through interviews with faculty and Information Services, and examined the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies reports on cyberinfrastructure. Findings – The paper finds that while the merged information services organization is not yet a resounding success from the perspectives of staff in information services or faculty, it is a brave attempt to respond to the future. Originality/value – This paper is useful to others thinking the organizational relationship between libraries and campus information technology. Keywords - Academic libraries, Communication technologies, Organizational restructuring, Information services Paper type - Case stud

Crop residue displacement by soil inversion: Annelid responses and their impact on carbon and nitrogen dynamics in a lab-based mesocosm study

In the context of sustainable agriculture, a deeper knowledge of the effects of soil management on soil annelids is needed, as they play an important role in many soil processes. In a laboratory mesocosm experiment, we compared the simulated effect of ploughing by inverting the top soil (crop residues at 15 cm depth) to a noninversion treatment (crop residues on the soil surface) using the soil type Haplic Luvisol. We investigated the response of earthworms and enchytraeids and the consequences for microbial and chemical soil parameters. Four treatments with soil fauna were established by adding: (i) endogeic earthworms (Octolasion cyaneum), (ii) anecic earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris), (iii) a combination of two enchytraeid species (Enchytraeus crypticus and Enchytraeus christenseni) and (iv) having control columns (without annelids). Feeding behaviour of annelids was investigated using isotopic analysis (delta C-13, delta N-15), and chemical and microbial soil properties were measured. Carbon and nitrogen losses in the form of gas emissions (CO2, N2O) and leachate were recorded during the time of incubation.We found no interactions of soil inversion and annelid addition on chemical and microbial soil properties; these properties were closely related to crop residue placement, indicated by the effect of soil inversion between 0 and 20 cm. Below 20 cm, this effect disappeared. Here, the presence of enchytraeids enhanced soil microbial properties, regardless of soil inversion. Stimulating microbial activity and increasing soil aeration seem to be the most important factors that increase CO2-C emissions in the presence of anecic earthworms. N2O-N emissions were consistently higher (+188%) in the inverted columns. Our results show that regardless of the placement of crop residues, anecic earthworms and enchytraeids fed more on crop residue derived carbon than endogeic earthworms, while endogeic earthworms appeared to avoid feeding at the soil surface. Moreover, it was found that the inversion and the annelid effects did not interact in an experimental setting where soil inversion is carried out in a form without detracting or impairing the annelids directly

Campus Open Access Funds: Experiences of the KU “One University” Open Access Author Fund

INTRODUCTION: In the summer of 2012, librarians from the Lawrence and Kansas City campuses of the University of Kansas (KU) proposed the creation of a KU “One University” Open Access Fund (OA Author Fund) to support open access publishing for its faculty, students, and staff. KU is a major public research and teaching institution of 28,000 students and 2,600 faculty on five campuses (Lawrence, Kansas City, Overland Park, Wichita, and Salina) (http://ku.edu/about), and has been a leader in open access initiatives for many years. A working group of librarians came together to create and implement a pilot project to explore the administration and impact of an open access publishing fund on KU authors, and the fund was launched in October 2012. DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT: This report documents the group’s experience in developing eligibility criteria and administering the OA Fund. Here we provide insight into our efforts implementing the project, funding results, and plans for continuation. We share the results of the first two years of the OA Author Fund pilot and the lessons learned about open access fund administration. NEXT STEPS: At the close of the pilot in May 2014, the OA fund review team solicited feedback from a faculty advisory group regarding grant recipients, allocation of funds by discipline, and the application process. Based on our findings, we revised eligibility criteria to create a more equitable funding opportunity for the second pilot. The fund was re-launched using these new criteria in Fall of 2014

Properties of permutation-based gene tests and controlling type 1 error using a summary statistic based gene test

Background: The advent of genome-wide association studies has led to many novel disease-SNP associations, opening the door to focused study on their biological underpinnings. Because of the importance of analyzing these associations, numerous statistical methods have been devoted to them. However, fewer methods have attempted to associate entire genes or genomic regions with outcomes, which is potentially more useful knowledge from a biological perspective and those methods currently implemented are often permutation-based. Results: One property of some permutation-based tests is that their power varies as a function of whether significant markers are in regions of linkage disequilibrium (LD) or not, which we show from a theoretical perspective. We therefore develop two methods for quantifying the degree of association between a genomic region and outcome, both of whose power does not vary as a function of LD structure. One method uses dimension reduction to “filter” redundant information when significant LD exists in the region, while the other, called the summary-statistic test, controls for LD by scaling marker Z-statistics using knowledge of the correlation matrix of markers. An advantage of this latter test is that it does not require the original data, but only their Z-statistics from univariate regressions and an estimate of the correlation structure of markers, and we show how to modify the test to protect the type 1 error rate when the correlation structure of markers is misspecified. We apply these methods to sequence data of oral cleft and compare our results to previously proposed gene tests, in particular permutation-based ones. We evaluate the versatility of the modification of the summary-statistic test since the specification of correlation structure between markers can be inaccurate. Conclusion: We find a significant association in the sequence data between the 8q24 region and oral cleft using our dimension reduction approach and a borderline significant association using the summary-statistic based approach. We also implement the summary-statistic test using Z-statistics from an already-published GWAS of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder (COPD) and correlation structure obtained from HapMap. We experiment with the modification of this test because the correlation structure is assumed imperfectly known