Project SEARCH: Work-Based Transition Program for Young Adults with Disabilities

Historically people with significant disabilities were restricted to places such as adult activity centers, sheltered workshops, nursing homes, and institutions. Studies have shown the high school drop-out rate for this population is higher than those who are non-disabled. Policy makers concluded that these individuals needed to be better prepared for a successful adult life beyond high school. Individuals with developmental disabilities in the state of Missouri are over two times less likely to be employed than the national average. Laws have been passed to provide supports and services for individuals with disabilities to be as independent as possible. This paper explored the perspectives of a host site employer, parents, agency staff, and young adults with developmental disabilities in their participating experience of a one-year high school transition program with the main goal of employment. The students experienced employment through internships within a health care business setting. I conducted interviews, questionnaires, and observations in order to gain insight into the perspectives from each partner. Research questions included: How does Project SEARCH work? What are the parent perspectives on why and how Project SEARCH has prepared their children with developmental disabilities for competitive employment? What are the student perspectives on why and how Project SEARCH has prepared them for competitive employment? What are the business host site’s employer and other agency staff perspectives on why and how they have prepared students with developmental disabilities for competitive employment? Findings found within the research were that Project SEARCH was a collaborative effort among various agencies to provide internships in a completely immersed business setting to students with developmental disabilities in iii which the ultimate goal was competitive employment. Parents perceived the program as indispensable to the increase in skill sets that occurred. Students perceived the experience obtained in the program as increasing their self-advocacy and self-confidence skills. By purchasing a license for the Project SEARCH program, the agencies involved have increased the opportunities for young adults with disabilities to obtain job readiness skills that impact the participant for the rest of his or her life. The results indicated although not every intern was employed upon exiting the program, skills beyond measure were obtained due to participation in an immersed workplace setting with specialized instruction in employability skills

Black Women in the Economy: Facing Glass Ceilings in Academia

The shrinking population of Black male doctoral degree holders may hold much of the key to the problems of Black women. Declines in Black male interest in doctoral degrees, has clearly not spelled gains for the recruitment of Black female scholars. New evidence of these patterns is visible in the latest government data on academic achievement of Black women and teaching job success. While Black women are achieving at high rates, they are also systematically by-passed by an expanded recruitment of African and Caribbean males to fill teaching positions in doctoral and research institutions. This new trend has probably reduced Black women\u27s chances more than any other. Second, the new found Black male networks have had major success in assuring members get support and information on academic jobs. Major questions need to be raised about these trends and more attention focused on unearthing and correcting root causes of specific discriminatory treatment of Black women in university faculty hiring and promotion

Unpacking the sociotechnical challenges of IoT design work in practice

The term `Internet of Things' (IoT), was coined in 1999 (Ashton et al., 2009), and has continued to grow under this heading since its conception with a number of subheadings developed (such as, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)) to give further classification as the field has expanded. By 2014 the IoT was being considered as an industry in its own right, "with the potential to have a greater impact on society than the  rst digital revolution" (Walport, 2014, p. 6). The Internet of Things is a growing industry spanning many different markets and sectors with worldwide device forecasts going from 9.7 billion in 2020 to over 29 billion in 2030 (Vailshery, 2022). As the industry matures it is becoming much easier for businesses and individuals to create IoT products and to release them onto the market. Components and resources are more readily available and a range of supporting services have been developed. Connected devices can now be seen in virtually every business sector. However, there are many design challenges associated with IoT design that have not yet been addressed in the academic literature. For example, the embedded, long-term, infrastructural nature of the IoT presents a somewhat unique design space for practitioners. The many layers of products and services add complexity to the task of design, both for new product design (Lee et al., 2019b) and modification of existing deployed systems. As embeddedness is core to the vision of ubiquitous computing it is important for research to move beyond the lab into real-world deployed settings (Fox et al., 2006). This is of particular importance to address theory practice gaps where research attempts to influence and inform interaction design. Investigating the existence and extent of a theory-practice gap requires a closer look at how interaction designers within the commercial world actually work, how their roles are organised and what constitutes professional competence (Goodman et al., 2011). The aim of the research in this thesis is to explore the challenges faced by design practitioners within the IoT industry and their methods of addressing them. This is with the intention of attending to the theory practice gap through provision of insights for the purpose of informing the creation of methods, practices and further academic research into the work of designing the IoT. The research was guided by the primary research question: 1) How do IoT related design team organise their work? which is addressed through the secondary questions of: 2) What design challenges are being faced when designing for the IoT within a commercial context? 3) What design practices are being applied to IoT related design work within these settings, and how? The findings reported here answer these research questions through the following contributions. 1) Identification of relational tensions within the process of IoT related design and demonstrations of practitioners methods of foregrounding them. 2) Demonstrations of the ways in which practitioners maintain visibility over tensions and product service layers to situate design reasoning. In particular, generation and use of notions of elemental states as a form of infrastructuring work, which builds on previous discussions of infrastructural inversion (Bowker, 1994; Simonsen et al., 2020) and the use of decision trees as a form of user journey mapping (Endmann and Keßner, 2016). 3) Identification of additional roles and responsibilities of digital plumbing (Tolmie et al., 2010; Castelli et al., 2021) and data-work within the IoT design space (Fischer et al., 2017)

Distinguishing Motive Through Perception of Emotions

The question of whether people use perceived expressions of emotion to infer motive is tested in this study. Naïve observers viewed target subjects performing a simple «tower building» task under more or less motivating conditions. Observers ranked target effort levels and ticked emotions displayed of four targets. Motive rankings matched target motive conditions well. Emotion checklist scores also showed high accuracy when compared with target self-reports of emotions experienced. Regression showed that most of the variance in motivation ratings was accounted for by emotions observed. Discussion centers on applications of this understanding of emotive perception in organizations, and the relation between the first two components of Salovey and Mayer’s (1990) model of emotional intelligence

Women, families and work. How to help L&Q’s women residents into work and tackle the barriers they face. Executive Summary

Women’s rates of employment are lower than men’s. Housing association residents' rates of employment are lower than those in other tenures. Thus women housing association tenants have high rates of out-of-work benefit claims and high rates of poverty. It is known that women housing association residents with children face constraints to employment, ranging from their own individual circumstances to shortages of services and problems with the jobs available. In this context, housing associations, including L&Q, have increasingly become involved in providing information, support and training to help their residents both to get work and also to progress in it. The research aimed to better understand the constraints felt by L&Q’s women residents with children making the transition to work, and the supports that could them make and sustain the transition. It also aimed to identify a range of practical ways in which L&Q could support women residents to overcome barriers to work. It complements ‘Real London Lives’, another research project carried out by L&Q and its 15 partner housing associations which form the G15 group in London (http://reallondonlives.co.uk

Women, families and work : how to help L&Q's women residents into work and tackle the barriers they face

Women’s rates of employment are lower than men’s. Housing association residents' rates of employment are lower than those in other tenures. Thus women housing association tenants have high rates of out-of-work benefit claims and high rates of poverty. It is known that women housing association residents with children face constraints to employment, ranging from their own individual circumstances to shortages of services and problems with the jobs available. In this context, housing associations, including L&Q, have increasingly become involved in providing information, support and training to help their residents both to get work and also to progress in it. The research aimed to better understand the constraints felt by L&Q’s women residents with children making the transition to work, and the supports that could them make and sustain the transition. It also aimed to identify a range of practical ways in which L&Q could support women residents to overcome barriers to work. It complements ‘Real London Lives’, another research project carried out by L&Q and its 15 partner housing associations which form the G15 group in London (http://reallondonlives.co.uk

Women, Families and Work : How to help L&Q's women residents into work and tackle the barriers they face

Women’s rates of employment are lower than men’s. Housing association residents' rates of employment are lower than those in other tenures. Thus women housing association tenants have high rates of out-of-work benefit claims and high rates of poverty. It is known that women housing association residents with children face constraints to employment, ranging from their own individual circumstances to shortages of services and problems with the jobs available. In this context, housing associations, including L&Q, have increasingly become involved in providing information, support and training to help their residents both to get work and also to progress in it. The research aimed to better understand the constraints felt by L&Q’s women residents with children making the transition to work, and the supports that could them make and sustain the transition. It also aimed to identify a range of practical ways in which L&Q could support women residents to overcome barriers to work. It complements ‘Real London Lives’, another research project carried out by L&Q and its 15 partner housing associations which form the G15 group in London (http://reallondonlives.co.uk