Blind Adults in America: Their Lives and Challenges

In an effort to learn more about Americans with disabilities, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided that the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) would be used to gather information about men, women, and children with disabilities living all across the country. They interviewed thousands of adults and children with disabilities in 1994 and 1995, including 779 legally blind adults representing 993,766 non-institutionalized adults ages 18 and older nationwide, and 52 children representing 65,296 non-institutionalized legally blind children ages 5 to 17 nationwide. The federal government, however, never used the data to provide information to advocates or policy makers about the daily lives of legally blind adults and children. The National Center for Policy Research (CPR) for Women & Families used the NHIS data to conduct the first comprehensive statistical analysis of data on blind adults. With the support of the Aid Association for the Blind of the District of Columbia, we have summarized the information into this report. Some of the findings support assumptions that have been made about blind adults, while other findings highlight previously unrecognized needs of this very important group of Americans

The Impact of Work Supports: The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Illinois 2009

This document models the impact that work supports have on family income and expenses in two different ways. Both model a family with one parent and two children (a preschooler and a schoolage child) on the south side of Chicago (Cook County) Illinois. The document begins with a description of the work supports and child supports that are modeled, followed by an explanation of how and why the taxes and tax credits are treated differently in this document than in the Self-Sufficiency Standard itself. The first modeling section of this document shows the impact of work supports on monthly costs. The second modeling section in this document shows the impact of work supports on wage adequacy

The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Illinois

An introduction to the Self-Sufficiency standard and how it differs from the federal poverty measure

Equity and Excellence in Research Funding

The tension between equity and excellence is fundamental in science policy. This tension might appear to be resolved through the use of merit-based evaluation as a criterion for research funding. This is not the case. Merit-based decision making alone is insufficient because of inequality aversion, a fundamental tendency of people to avoid extremely unequal distributions. The distribution of performance in science is extremely unequal, and no decision maker with the power to establish a distribution of public money would dare to match the level of inequality in research performance. We argue that decision makers who increase concentration of resources because they accept that research resources should be distributed according to merit probably implement less inequality than would be justified by differences in research performance. Here we show that the consequences are likely to be suppression of incentives for the very best scientists. The consequences for the performance of a national research system may be substantial. Decision makers are unaware of the issue, as they operate with distributional assumptions of normality that guide our everyday intuitions

Where Is Science Going?

Do researchers produce scientific and technical knowledge differently than they did ten years ago? What will scientific research look like ten years from now? Addressing such questions means looking at science from a dynamic systems perspective. Two recent books about the social system of science, by Ziman and by Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott, and Trow, accept this challenge and argue that the research enterprise is changing. This article uses bibliometric data to examine the extent and nature of changes identified by these authors, taking as an example British research. We use their theoretical frameworks to investigate five characteristics of research said to be increasingly pervasive-namely, application, interdisciplinarity, networking, internationalization, and concentration of resources. Results indicate that research may be becoming more interdisciplinary and that research is increasingly conducted more in networks, both domestic and international; but the data are more ambiguous regarding application and concentration. CR - Copyright © 1996 Sage Publications, Inc

Climate and society in 20th century Mexico

Mexican agriculture has been greatly transformed by the widespread introduction of 'Green Revolution' technologies (irrigation, chemical fertilizers, and improved seeds), through land reform, and by land use policies oriented to export crops and grain production. Drought prone Mexico provides an excellent case to study how technological and social changes alter the impact of drought on food and agricultural system. A goal is to document and understand how relationships between climate and agriculture in Mexico have changed in the last fifty years. The results for several locations will be interpreted in light of the prospects of regional climate change due to global warming. This analysis will be complimented by four case studies of vulnerability to drought which will use local records and interviews to try and show how environmental, technological, and social changes may have altered the impacts of climate on local agricultural systems

THE ROLE OF THE FOREIGN CAPITAL IN THE INTEGRATION PROCESS OF REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA

Foreign capital has significant role for every national economy, regardless of its level of development. For the developed countries it is necessary to support sustainable development. For the developing countries, it’s used to increase accumulation and rate of investments to create conditions for more intensive economic growth. For the transition countries, it’s useful to carry out the reforms and cross to open economy, to cross the past long term problems and to create conditions for stable and continuous growth of GDP, as well as integration in world economy. In accordance with low level of accumulation and rate of development, Macedonia as a transition country has a very big need for foreign capital. When we talk about the foreign capital and its need and significance for the Macedonian economy, on the first place we have in mind the foreign direct investments, that result by the great number of externalizes produced by FDI for the national economy. But, also credit and loan as traditional form of transfer of capital in international economic relations, it will be useful for the growth only if it is at the reasonable level (in regard of the national external debt) from one side, and if its use in the development of a certain economy is efficient, from other side.Development of the national economy; Foreign capital; Credits and loans; Foreign direct investments.

Studying patterns of use of transport modes through data mining - Application to U.S. national household travel survey data set

Data collection activities related to travel require large amounts of financial and human resources to be conducted successfully. When available resources are scarce, the information hidden in these data sets needs to be exploited, both to increase their added value and to gain support among decision makers not to discontinue such efforts. This study assessed the use of a data mining technique, association analysis, to understand better the patterns of mode use from the 2009 U.S. National Household Travel Survey. Only variables related to self-reported levels of use of the different transportation means are considered, along with those useful to the socioeconomic characterization of the respondents. Association rules potentially showed a substitution effect between cars and public transportation, in economic terms but such an effect was not observed between public transportation and nonmotorized modes (e.g., bicycling and walking). This effect was a policy-relevant finding, because transit marketing should be targeted to car drivers rather than to bikers or walkers for real improvement in the environmental performance of any transportation system. Given the competitive advantage of private modes extensively discussed in the literature, modal diversion from car to transit is seldom observed in practice. However, after such a factor was controlled, the results suggest that modal diversion should mainly occur from cars to transit rather than from nonmotorized modes to transi

Exercises in applied phonics for grade two

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit