Mentoring, Policy and Politics

In this policy brief, former P/PV President Gary Walker asks, Is mentoring now a durable part of American social policy? If so is this unalloyed good news? Adapted from an article that first appeared in The Handbook of Youth Mentoring (DuBois and Karcher, ed. 2005), the brief reflects on the impact and appeal of mentoring, addresses various critiques of the movement and suggests future directions for mentorings application

High School Students as Mentors: Findings From the Big Brothers Big Sisters School-Based Mentoring Impact Study Executive Summary

Recently, high schools have become a popular source of mentors for school-based mentoring (SBM) programs. This executive summary outlines key findings and recommendations from our High School Students as Mentors report, which drew on data from our large-scale random assignment impact study of Big Brothers Big Sisters SBM (Herrera, et al. 2007). Our research indicated that, on average, high school students were much less effective than adults at yielding impacts for the youth they mentor, but it also identified several program practices that were linked with longer, stronger and more effective high school mentor relationships

Multi-modal Embedding Fusion-based Recommender

Recommendation systems have lately been popularized globally, with primary use cases in online interaction systems, with significant focus on e-commerce platforms. We have developed a machine learning-based recommendation platform, which can be easily applied to almost any items and/or actions domain. Contrary to existing recommendation systems, our platform supports multiple types of interaction data with multiple modalities of metadata natively. This is achieved through multi-modal fusion of various data representations. We deployed the platform into multiple e-commerce stores of different kinds, e.g. food and beverages, shoes, fashion items, telecom operators. Here, we present our system, its flexibility and performance. We also show benchmark results on open datasets, that significantly outperform state-of-the-art prior work.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure

The Item Veto and the Threat of Appropriations Bundling in Alaska

The item veto power forms an important check on the legislature in many states, including Alaska. The power allows the governor to veto individual items in an appropriations bill rather than vetoing or signing the bill as a whole. In 2011 the Alaska State Legislature contemplated challenging this crucial executive power. A proposed draft of the annual capital appropriations bill contained language that linked each energy appropriation to all the others, providing that if the governor struck one item then none of the items would go into effect. Further, the legislature inserted language providing that none of the proposed energy appropriations would go into effect if the section of the bill linking them together were successfully challenged in court. While neither provision was included in the final version of the bill signed into law, they prompted a controversy about whether such language would comport with the requirements of the state constitution. If they had been passed, the provisions would indeed have been unconstitutional and invalid, as they usurp the governor\u27s constitutional item veto power and violate the confinement clause\u27s requirement that the content of appropriations bills be limited to appropriations

The true costs of knowledge exchange – a checklist

Planning and budgeting knowledge exchange activities can often be a black box exercise, with activity occurring in an ad-hoc and un-costed fashion. Drawing on case studies of successful knowledge exchange projects, Denis Karcher and Chris Cvitanovic present a framework for where costs fall in knowledge exchange processes and a checklist for researchers looking to plan for knowledge exchange

FAST FOOD NATION: THE DARK SIDE OF THE ALL-AMERICAN MEAL; A BOOK REVIEW DISCUSSION

This document contains the outline of a book review given on Eric Schlosser's book: Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, published by HarperCollins, January 8, 2002. The review was given by the author at the 2002 WCC-72 meetings.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

The Supreme Court Takes One Step Forward and the NLRB Takes One Step Backward: Redefining Constructive Concerted Activities

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or the Act) governs the relationship between employers and employees in the United States. Specifically, section 7 of the Act 3 defines the basic rights of employees and section 8(a)4 defines employer unfair labor practices. Section 8(a)(1) generally proscribes employers from interfering with employees in the exercise of section 7 rights.\u27 Thus,many unfair labor practice cases turn on whether section 7 of the Act protects the employee activity. Section 7 protects concerted activities engaged in for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection. \u27 Courts frequently struggle to determine whether given employee activities with which an employer has interfered are concerted activities. \u27 This determination is particularly difficult when one employee acts alone instead of with other employees. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or the Board)formally announced the doctrine of constructive concerted activities in 1966 in Interboro Contractors, Inc. Under this doctrine an individual employee\u27s attempt to enforce a provision of a collective bargaining agreement is concerted activity even if the attempt does not contemplate group action. During the years since the Board promulgated the Interboro doctrine, the circuit courts split on the issue of whether and in what circumstances individual activity could constitute concerted activity. The Supreme Court recently resolved the conflict by approving the Interboro doctrine in NLRB v. City Disposal Systems, Inc. Although the Interboro doctrine is theoretically inapplicable in a nonunion context, the Board established a collateral doctrine in 1975 in Alleluia Cushion Co. In Alleluia Cushion the Board held that individual activity seeking to enforce statutory occupational safety rights was concerted activity absent a showing that other employees disavowed the activity.16 No circuit court ever approved the Alleluia Cushion doctrine and the Board recently overruled it in Meyers Industries. This Recent Development examines the doctrine of constructive concerted activities in union and nonunion contexts in light of both the Supreme Court\u27s approval of the Interboro doctrine and the NLRB\u27s rejection of Alleluia Cushion. Part II traces the history of NLRB and circuit court application of the constructive concerted activities doctrine in union and nonunion contexts. Part III discusses the City Disposal and Meyers Industries decisions. Part IV analyzes these decisions individually and conjuctively and examines the ramifications of the current definition of individual concerted activities. Finally, part IV of this Recent Development argues that the two decisions together result in an inconsistent application of section 7 protection to individual concerted activities and suggests a consolidated City Disposal-Alleluia Cushion analysis for constructive concerted activities issues in both union and nonunion settings