Program Design Snapshot: State Buy-In Programs for Children

Outlines the features, impact, and possible limitations of programs that allow moderate-income families without access to affordable private health insurance to buy public coverage for their children. Includes suggestions for increasing enrollment

California's Express Enrollment Program

Evaluates a pilot project that was implemented in ten school districts to test the effectiveness of a program that provides public health coverage to uninsured children by enrolling them through school lunch programs

To explore how coaches experience the challenge of developing their own professional practice

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them." Nicolo Machiavelli, 1515¹ Coaching is not new, although over the past decade its popularity has been fuelled by organisational trends which have demanded that leaders learn faster to retain competitive advantage. This rise in demand for coaching has raised questions about the quality of supply, and is driving the establishment of rigorous professional standards for the coaching industry. This exploratory study is concerned with making explicit the 'reality' of developing professional coaching practice. It takes a critical stance towards formal education as an approach to develop and sustain professional coaching practice. The specific intention was to consider the impact of the i-coach academy masters' programme on developing professional practice, with a view to enhancing the programme and ensuring congruence with participants' needs. The basic theoretical position lies within the field of Phenomenology, which sets out to obtain knowledge about how we think and feel in the most direct ways; it attempts to 'bracket' assumptions we have about things in order to grasp them in their most essential nature. The project report documents the phenomenological research I undertook with i-coach academy participants in South Africa and the UK from 2002 - 2005. One of the principle intentions was tounderstand their experience of developing professional practice, separate from the construct of formal education. Equally there was an aim to develop increased clarity about the activities considered most helpful to developing and sustaining professional coaching practice. The results of this research were used in combination with other materials to enhance the i-coach masters' programme. An educational framework for developing and sustaining professional coaching practice has been documented. The research also points the way to areas for further inquiry and development, which are outlined in the closing chapters. The experience of the journey to establish a formal framework for the education of professional coaching is reflected well in Machiavelli's quote above. Whilst progress has been made toward establishing a foundation for educating professional coaches, it is also acknowledged that the learning cycles are continuous and the journey is never complete. 1 Extract from The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli, Written c. 1505, published 1515, Translated by W. K. Marriott Pag

A Detailed Investigation of the Proposed NN Serpentis Planetary System

The post-main sequence eclipsing binary NN Serpentis was recently announced as the potential host of at least two massive planetary companions. In that work, the authors put forward two potential architectures that fit the observations of the eclipsing binary with almost identical precision. In this work, we present the results of a dynamical investigation of the orbital stability of both proposed system architectures, finding that they are only stable for scenarios in which the planets are locked in mutual mean motion resonance. In the discovery work, the authors artificially fixed the orbital eccentricity of the more massive planet, NN Ser(AB) c, at 0. Here, we reanalyse the observational data on NN Serpentis without this artificial constraint, and derive a new orbital solution for the two proposed planets. We detail the results of further dynamical simulations investigating the stability of our new orbital solution, and find that allowing a small non-zero eccentricity for the outer planet renders the system unstable. We conclude that, although the original orbits proposed for the NN Serpentis planetary system prove dynamically feasible, further observations of the system are vital in order to better constrain the system's true architecture.Comment: Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society; 5 figures, 2 table

Building an On-Ramp to Children's Health Coverage: A Report on California's Express Lane Eligibility Program

Documents the successes and current policy and procedural barriers to enrolling eligible but uninsured children through California's Express Lane Eligibility initiative, which has been piloted in 72 schools in five school districts across California

The Dynamical History of Chariklo and its Rings

Chariklo is the only small Solar system body confirmed to have rings. Given the instability of its orbit, the presence of rings is surprising, and their origin remains poorly understood. In this work, we study the dynamical history of the Chariklo system by integrating almost 36,000 Chariklo clones backwards in time for one Gyr under the influence of the Sun and the four giant planets. By recording all close encounters between the clones and planets, we investigate the likelihood that Chariklo's rings could have survived since its capture to the Centaur population. Our results reveal that Chariklo's orbit occupies a region of stable chaos, resulting in its orbit being marginally more stable than those of the other Centaurs. Despite this, we find that it was most likely captured to the Centaur population within the last 20 Myr, and that its orbital evolution has been continually punctuated by regular close encounters with the giant planets. The great majority (> 99%) of those encounters within one Hill radius of the planet have only a small effect on the rings. We conclude that close encounters with giant planets have not had a significant effect on the ring structure. Encounters within the Roche limit of the giant planets are rare, making ring creation through tidal disruption unlikely

An Orbital Stability Study of the Proposed Companions of SW Lyncis

We have investigated the dynamical stability of the proposed companions orbiting the Algol type short-period eclipsing binary SW Lyncis (Kim et al. 2010). The two candidate companions are of stellar to sub-stellar nature, and were inferred from timing measurements of the system's primary and secondary eclipses. We applied well-tested numerical techniques to accurately integrate the orbits of the two companions and to test for chaotic dynamical behaviour. We carried out the stability analysis within a systematic parameter survey varying both the geometries and orientation of the orbits of the companions, as well as their masses. In all our numerical integrations we found that the proposed SW Lyn multi-body system is highly unstable on time-scales on the order of 1000 years. Our results cast doubt on the interpretation that the timing variations are caused by two companions. This work demonstrates that a straightforward dynamical analysis can help to test whether a best-fit companion-based model is a physically viable explanation for measured eclipse timing variations. We conclude that dynamical considerations reveal that the propsed SW Lyncis multi-body system most likely does not exist or the companions have significantly different orbital properties as conjectured in Kim et al. (2010).Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to and accepted by JASS -- Journal for Astronomy and Space Sciences (using JKAS LaTeX style file

Decoding sequential vs non-sequential two-photon double ionization of helium using nuclear recoil

Above 54.4 eV, two-photon double ionization of helium is dominated by a sequential absorption process, producing characteristic behavior in the single and triple differential cross sections. We show that the signature of this process is visible in the nuclear recoil cross section, integrated over all energy sharings of the ejected electrons, even below the threshold for the sequential process. Since nuclear recoil momentum imaging does not require coincident photoelectron measurement, the predicted images present a viable target for future experiments with new short-pulse VUV and soft X-ray sources.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure