A history of cross-cultural exchanges in Finnish and Swedish diddling

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Employer Benefits and Costs of English@Work Participation

Evaluation of English@Work’s benefits and costs for participating employers.The Ray Marshall Center (RMC), with support from the Literacy Coalition of Central Texas (LCCT), has conducted an evaluation of English@Work’s benefits and costs for participating employers, a required component of LCCT’s grant from the Houston Center for Literacy-English@Work which was launched as a small nonprofit in Austin in 2005 and was subsumed by the LCCT in January 2014, is a unique approach to teaching English-language skills by contextualizing, customizing, and providing them in the workplace. Early results indicated that this approach substantially outperformed more traditional approaches that rely heavily on classroom instruction, provide few hours of actual instruction per week, and/or fail to contextualize and tailor instruction in the setting and language of the workplace. Students made larger gains on various literacy measure more quickly than these more traditional approaches. And, students indicated that they felt more motivated to learn in a cohort of their peers that was situated within their workplace. After three years evolving and growing under the auspices of the LCCT, the Texas Workforce Commission’s (TWC) Site-based Workplace Literacy Project has provided grant funding to scale up English@Work in Austin and expand it to the Houston area over the period from May 2016 to June 2017. The grant from TWC supports literacy and career services for more than 700 participants and plans to provide credentials or certificates of completion for around 490 of these participants over the grant period.Literacy Coalition of Central Texas and Houston Center for LiteracyRay Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resource

Behavioral Economics and Workforce Development: A Review of the Literature from Labor Economics and the Broader Field

Literature Reviewhere is mutual benefit for employers and workers when workers improve their skills beyond the minimum requirements for their position—a fact not lost on employers, many of who are willing to provide education and training opportunities to staff, including frontline workers. These opportunities typically include on-the-job-training, tuition reimbursement for postsecondary courses, and paid leave to attend classes. Despite often generous budgets for these activities, relatively few workers take advantage of these opportunities, potentially limiting increases in productivity, wages and longer-term career advancement (Tompson, Benz, Agiesta, & Junius, 2013). This dilemma raises an interesting research question: Can emerging lessons from behavioral science experiments be applied to cutting the Gordian Knot of worker participation in education and training programs? This review of current literature on the topic is intended to explore the strengths and limitations of applying tools of behavioral sciences to increase the participation and completion rate of training for lower-wage, frontline incumbent workers in ways that benefit both workers and sponsoring firms.The Hitachi FoundationRay Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resource

CareerAdvance® Implementation Study Findings through FY 2018

This report examines the implementation of the third year of HPOG II services in a five-year grant cycle, including post-HPOG sustainability planning for CareerAdvance®. This report focuses on how and why the program has changed and adjusted to meet the requirements of HPOG II, while responding to the needs of the participants being served, the local job market, and the partners working together to implement and sustain the program. First, this report briefly describes the organizations partnering to implement the HPOG II version of CareerAdvance®. It then examines changes made to the program components, including the eligibility requirements, recruitment, assessment, and selection process, support services, training options, and other program elements. Also, it describes the HPOG II FY 2018 (September 1, 2017-August 31, 2018) cohorts enrolled in training, including assessment scores and detailed demographic information on the participants and their families, as well as program completion and certification attainment of all HPOG II participants (April 2016-August 31, 2018). A final section addresses CareerAdvance® sustainability planning issues, options and opportunities. This report draws from previous CareerAdvance® reports, information on the HPOG II program participants and their families, and interviews with CAP, Tulsa Tech, Family and Children Services, and Tulsa Community WorkAdvance leadership and staff.Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human ServicesRay Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resource

Digestion, rumen fermentation and circulating concentrations of insulin, growth hormone and IGF-1 in steers fed diets based on different proportions of maize silage and grass silage

Replacing grass silage with maize silage results in a fundamental change in the ratio of structural to non-structural carbohydrates with commensurate changes in rumen fermentation patterns and nutrient utilisation. This study investigated the effects of feeding four forage mixtures, namely grass silage (G); 67 g/100 g grass silage133 g/100 g maize silage (GGM); 67 g/100 g maize silage133/100 g grass silage (MMG); maize silage (M) to four ruminally and duodenally canulated Holstein Friesian steers. All diets were formulated to be isonitrogenous (22.4 g N/kg DM) using a concentrate mixture. Dietary dry matter (DM) and organic matter (OM) digestibility increased with ascending maize silage inclusion (P,0.1) whereas starch and neutral detergent fibre digestibility declined (P,0.05). Ratio of non-glucogenic to glucogenic precursors in the rumen fluid increased with maize silage inclusion (P,0.01) with a commensurate reduction in rumen pH (P,0.05). Mean circulating concentrations of insulin were greatest and similar in diets MMG and GGM, lower in diet M and lowest in diet G (P,0.01). There were no effects of diet on the mean circulating concentration of growth hormone (GH), or the frequency, amplitude and duration of GH pulses, or the mean circulating concentrations of IGF-1. Increasing levels of DM, OM and starch intakes with the substitution of grass silage with maize silage affected overall digestion, nutrient partitioning and subsequent circulating concentrations of insulin

Prosodic Resonance

We may regard a syllable as consisting of an initial consonant cluster (which may be zero), a vowel cluster, and a final consonant cluster (which may be zero in most schemes of phonemic analysis)

Community Health Centers: Health Care as It Could Be

This article explores the potential of community health centers (CHCs) to become a central component providing health care in America. It focuses on health centers as a proposed solution to the dual national problems of access to care and the shortage of primary care doctoring. It argues that CHCs have the capacity to address the problem of access to health services and to provide a vibrant model for the revival of primary care. Part I deals with the history, structure, current scope, and funding of CHCs. Part II looks at national health care goals and how CHCs are uniquely poised to actualize those goals. The demonstrated successes and potential growth of the CHC model are viewed against the backdrop of national health care priorities established through the Healthy People 2010 report. Part III looks at physician workforce issues, Graduate Medical Education (GME), and efforts to extend residency programs to ambulatory settings, including CHCs. State initiatives to reform GME so that it will produce a physician workforce better adapted to meet local health care needs are discussed, and the needs for federal action are identified. The role of the GME funding structure is examined as a key component in shaping potential reforms. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the benefits delivered by CHCs and notes the need for systemic shifts to help facilitate the growth of this successful health care model. The broader policy questions of how CHC expansion fits into health care policy reform as a whole will be left to another Article