Lessons Learned in Eurasia Ministry: Mostly the Hard Way

The present article is based on a speech delivered at a conference of the United Methodist Church: “Eurasia-Central Asia – In Mission Together,” Fulton, Maryland, May 5, 2017

Increasing State Restrictions on Russian Protestant Seminaries

In sum, Russian Protestant seminaries are presently undergoing a trial by state inspection that threatens their very existence. Academics Perry Glanzer and Konstantin Petrenko are correct in asserting that the Russian state’s “power to license and accredit” is “the power of life and death” over any educational institution. State justifications for close oversight of Protestant seminaries appear overstated at best and lack credibility at worst. As regards state concerns for quality control, should not the Russian constitution’s requirement for separation of church and state take precedence over a secular government’s presumption to instruct believers on how best to train their clergy

A Promising Start: Year Up's Initial Impacts on Low-Income Young Adults' Careers

Year Up, a non-profit organization headquartered in Boston, was founded by a former software entrepreneur in 2000 to provide a year of training and work experience to urban young adults ages 18 to 24. It has been able to develop a network of program sites across the country without the constraints imposed by public funding. Initial results from a small-scale impact study conducted by Mobility demonstrate that Year Up students experience remarkable earnings gains after a year in the labor market, compared to a control group. These gains were achieved during one of the worst economic recessions in recent memory, a recession that hit young people particularly April 2011 A Promising Start Year Up's Initial Impacts on Low-Income Young Adults' Careers Anne Roder Mark Elliott economic mobility corporation 1 A Promising Start Year Up's Initial Impacts on Low-Income Young Adults' Careers hard. Also, the Year Up experience does not deter young people from pursuing further education—program participants are just as likely to enroll in postsecondary education as control group members

Getting In, Staying On, Moving Up: A Practitioner's Approach to Employment Retention

Changes in workforce development policy are requiring employment programs to develop job retention strategies. This report looks at the Vocational Foundation, Inc. (VFI), one of New York Citys most respected employment programs for disadvantaged youth, and the principles that underlie its successful job retention program, Moving Up, a 24-month postplacement strategy for placing and keeping clients in jobs. VFI is one of only a handful of programs nationwide with a well-defined job retention strategy and an internal MIS system designed to track participant outcomes. The report describes in detail the elements of VFIs program, from recruitment and training to job placement and follow-up, and closes with nine principles of effective practice for workforce programs to consider as they develop their own retention efforts

Through the Eye of a Needle: The Challenge of Providing Employment Services in New York's Chinatown Post September 11th

Prepared for the US Department of Labor, this P/PV report evaluates the effectiveness of the National Emergency Grant (NEG) money awarded to organizations in Chinatown in the wake of September 11th. Through interviews with program staff and key informants, P/PV examines the outcomes achieved by individual grantees, assesses the effect of the NEG on overall service provision and provides recommendations about how the Chinatown NEG could be adjusted to respond to similar situations in the future

Relative Strength

We heard a lot during the 2000 presidential campaign about the importance of working families. Each party has done its best to demonstrate that it will be the better friend to these households. Ironically, the nation's workforce development policies have not only not paid much attention to families, but they have made it considerably more difficult to implement family-oriented employment programs. Relative Strength attempts to shed some light on why developing such programs is so challenging, how some organizations have managed to do it, and how their experiences can inform the field. We do not expect, nor would we recommend, that the employment field abandon its focus on individuals in favor of families. But it does seem that there is a need and considerable interest in undertaking such efforts if more flexible workforce development policies can be developed

Relationship between use of ankle-foot orthoses and quality of life and psychological well being : a research plan

An ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) is an externally applied device that encompasses the joints of the ankle and foot, used to modify the structural and functional characteristics of the neuromuscular and skeletal systems(ISO,1989,a&b). AFOs are prescribed for people who have a loss of function affecting their mobility, experienced in wide range of conditions such as stroke, poliomyelitis, cerebral palsy, spina bifida and osteoarthritis

Exploiting Data Representation for Fault Tolerance

We explore the link between data representation and soft errors in dot products. We present an analytic model for the absolute error introduced should a soft error corrupt a bit in an IEEE-754 floating-point number. We show how this finding relates to the fundamental linear algebra concepts of normalization and matrix equilibration. We present a case study illustrating that the probability of experiencing a large error in a dot product is minimized when both vectors are normalized. Furthermore, when data is normalized we show that the absolute error is less than one or very large, which allows us to detect large errors. We demonstrate how this finding can be used by instrumenting the GMRES iterative solver. We count all possible errors that can be introduced through faults in arithmetic in the computationally intensive orthogonalization phase, and show that when scaling is used the absolute error can be bounded above by one