A Preliminary Look at Early Educational Results of the Opportunity NYC - Family Rewards Program: A Research Note for Funders

Targeted toward very low-income families in six high-poverty New York City communities, Family Rewards offers cash payments tied to efforts and achievements in children's education, family preventive health care practices, and parents' employment. This paper reviews data on participants' receipt of rewards and offers preliminary estimates of the program's impacts on selected educational outcomes during the first year

Reducing the effects of insomnia on the workplace

Online programs are a cost-effective way of helping employees sleep at night and work better during the day, writes Jared Mille

4−Equitable Tree Labelings

We assign the labels {0,1,2,3} to the vertices of a graph; each edge is assigned the absolute difference of the incident vertices’ labels. For the labeling to be 4−equitable, we require the edge labels and vertex labels to each be distributed as uniformly as possible. We study 4−equitable labelings of different trees and prove all cater-pillars, symmetric generalized n−stars (or symmetric spiders), and complete n −ary trees for all n ∈ N are 4−equitable

Training Selected Churches in the Iowa-Missouri Conference of Seventh-day Adventists to Minister to Cohabiting Couples

Problem The number of cohabiting couples has dramatically risen over the last several decades. Even a significant amount of Seventh-day Adventist Church members, both young and old, have chosen to live together apart from a committed marriage. Living together without the covenant of marriage comes with many risks and many negative effects on both adults and children. With the prevalence of cohabitation increasing, the church is faced with a new ministry challenge and opportunity. Churches need to be educated about the biblical theology of sexual intimacy and the dangers and damage that come with cohabitation. Furthermore, churches need biblical strategies to minister faithfully to cohabiting couples. Method A three-part seminar and accompanying workbook were developed to train churches to minister to cohabiting couples. Two churches in the Iowa-Missouri Conference of Seventh-day Adventists were selected and agreed to individually participate in the seminar on two separate Sabbaths in August of 2017, respectively. In addition to sharing the biblical and scholarly research, three biblical and practical ministry suggestions were given so that ministry could be implemented. The effectiveness of the training seminar to educate and equip churches was measured by a pre-seminar and post-seminar survey. A combined total of 41 pre-seminar and 31 postseminar surveys were completed. This cross-sectional quantitative quasi experimental research provided valuable data from both churches which was carefully analyzed and evaluated. Results The study revealed participants’ improvement in three key areas that were measured: (a) knowledge of cohabitation, (b) comfort in ministering to cohabiting couples, and (c) willingness to minister to cohabiting couples. Additionally, 1/3 of participants in Iowa, and nearly 2/3 from Missouri, reported a change in view about cohabitation as a result of the seminar. Furthermore, a large majority of participants indicated the seminar helped them understand more clearly that sexual immorality and cohabitation are prohibited by the Bible and the writings of Ellen G. White. Conclusions Based upon the participants’ survey data, the training seminar did appear to have success in improving knowledge of cohabitation, as well as improving participants’ comfort level and willingness to minister to cohabiting couples. The biblical ideal for sexual intimacy to occur only within a committed marriage, which is supported by much current research regarding the negative effects of cohabitation on adults and children, led many participants to more strongly disapprove of cohabitation. At the same time, the post-seminar survey revealed an increased number of participants believed that the church should intentionally minister to cohabiting couples. The apparent benefit of this seminar indicates the need for further research and continued training of churches

Optimization of ADC linkers: design and evaluation of a FRET-based ADC linker-library

Success of Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) relies on the maintained integrity of a chemical linker fusing a therapeutic payload to a monoclonal antibody. Recent reports have revealed the lead linker ValCitPABC has poor stability in rodent models compared to mammalian counterparts, resulting in many clinical investigations predicting poorer ADC efficacy due to premature payload release in these model systems. Optimization of this chemical linker to be resistant both in mouse and human models would streamline ADC progression into clinical trials. Herein we describe the synthesis and development of a FRET-based assay for evaluating linker stability in vitro. Evaluation of lysosomal release by catabolic proteases paired with serum stability testing identified a series of asparagine containing linkers which surpassed both the release kinetics and stability profiles of ValCitPABC. A synthetic scheme for MMAE attachment to these asparagine linkers was established. Ultimately, this work lays a foundation for future evaluation of these linker in vivo for the identification of next generation peptide linkers to surpass the limitations of ValCitPABC

Chordal Decomposition in Rank Minimized Semidefinite Programs with Applications to Subspace Clustering

Semidefinite programs (SDPs) often arise in relaxations of some NP-hard problems, and if the solution of the SDP obeys certain rank constraints, the relaxation will be tight. Decomposition methods based on chordal sparsity have already been applied to speed up the solution of sparse SDPs, but methods for dealing with rank constraints are underdeveloped. This paper leverages a minimum rank completion result to decompose the rank constraint on a single large matrix into multiple rank constraints on a set of smaller matrices. The re-weighted heuristic is used as a proxy for rank, and the specific form of the heuristic preserves the sparsity pattern between iterations. Implementations of rank-minimized SDPs through interior-point and first-order algorithms are discussed. The problem of subspace clustering is used to demonstrate the computational improvement of the proposed method.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Asynchronous Tournaments: A Resource for Now and the Future

Erick Roebuck and Jared Kubicka-Miller (SEARK College and Santiago Canyon College) share their experience with an asynchronous tournament hosted with the organization, protocommunications.com. Additionally, they will propose a possible season format for asynchronous competition that can begin immediately or after the pandemic