IMPROVING VETERAN ACCESS; STATUS OF OPERATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF VETERAN AFFAIRS WORK-STUDY PROGRAM

The usage status of The U.S. Department Veterans Affairs Work-Study Program is examined. Beneficiary numbers from the Global, Unites States, State, and Local/County perspective are reviewed. While of essential value, the program suffers from a lack of scholarly research and government oversight, and is further hindered by restrictive administrative rules lived first-hand. Research suggests that the program is operating outside of accountability to the taxpayer, presents as unnecessarily/overly-restrictive in accessibility, and is underutilized. The program appears to not be serving all veterans to full potential. The Work-Study Program is codified in Veterans Benefits\u27, Title 38 United States Code, Part III, Chapter 34, Subchapter IV, § 3485, and Pensions, Bonuses, and Veterans\u27 Relief, 38 Code of Federal Regulations, Chapter 1, § 21.4145. Keywords: veterans, education, work-study, access restrictions, legislation Author Note Preponderance of contacted Federal, State, and Local/County agencies did not respond to Freedom of Information and/or Research Assistance Requests. Peculiarly, the Office of the Director, VA Work-Study Program, Muskogee, Oklahoma, failed to respond to repeated contact attempts

The Statistics Concept Inventory: Development and analysis of a cognitive assessment instrument in statistics.

The Statistics Concept Inventory (SCI) is a multiple choice test designed to assess students' conceptual understanding of topics typically encountered in an introductory statistics course. This dissertation documents the development of the SCI from Fall 2002 up to Spring 2006. The first phase of the project essentially sought to answer the question: "Can you write a test to assess topics typically encountered in introductory statistics?" Book One presents the results utilized in answering this question in the affirmative. The bulk of the results present the development and evolution of the items, primarily relying on objective metrics to gauge effectiveness but also incorporating student feedback. The second phase boils down to: "Now that you have the test, what else can you do with it?" This includes an exploration of Cronbach's alpha, the most commonly-used measure of test reliability in the literature. An online version of the SCI was designed, and its equivalency to the paper version is assessed. Adding an extra wrinkle to the online SCI, subjects rated their answer confidence. These results show a general positive trend between confidence and correct responses. However, some items buck this trend, revealing potential sources of misunderstandings, with comparisons offered to the extant statistics and probability educational research. The third phase is a re-assessment of the SCI: "Are you sure?" A factor analytic study favored a uni-dimensional structure for the SCI, although maintaining the likelihood of a deeper structure if more items can be written to tap similar topics. A shortened version of the instrument is proposed, demonstrated to be able to maintain a reliability nearly identical to that of the full instrument. Incorporating student feedback and a faculty topics survey, improvements to the items and recommendations for further research are proposed. The state of the concept inventory movement is assessed, to offer a comparison to the work presented on the SCI. Finally, the dissertation concludes with a summary of the four years' progress, acknowledging that work is never complete but that the results thus far place the SCI in a strong position to grow for years to come

Economic Activity Analyses: The Need for Consensus

Extension professionals have shown eagerness and creativity when it comes to providing programming justification. However, the potential for misapplication of two common economic activity analyses requires Extension to standardized economic impact and economic contribution techniques. Readers are introduced to the cornerstones of economic activity analyses and are offered interpretations on the methodology needed to conduct an accurate impact or contribution analysis. Additionally, the authors suggest several other essential considerations that need to be addressed when undertaking any economic activity analysis. Other Extension professionals should look to this article and either show support or critique the proposed interpretations

Evaluating a cognitive tool built to aid decision making using decision making approach as a theoretical framework and using unobtrusive, behavior-based measures for analysis

Previously I designed and built an interface with the purpose of augmenting decision making within a particular curricular decision making context. The present study explores the usability of the newly created cognitive tool through analyzing its impact upon facilitating decision making. The introduction discusses how different types of cognitive tools facilitate decision making from a cognitive perspective. The present study examines the newly created dashboard by first breaking it into its five constituent regions. The methods section discusses the hypothesized function and usage patterns of each region. The primary research question was whether these different regions would cause participants to exhibit different exploratory behaviors. Differences in usage patterns between regions, combined with the knowledge of how different cognitive tools function, allowed this study to classify the function of each region of the cognitive tool. This study also considered several secondary factors including participant experience with technology, experience with curricular decision making, spatial acuity, and performance. The primary contribution of this study is a technique that offers researchers increased capabilities to conduct unobtrusive research that quantitatively informs interface design. The next step for this research is to extend these methods to focus upon longer-term research questions

Initial Top-Level Characterization of the Air Force Sustainment System

This draft white paper presents an initial top-level characterization of the Air Force sustainment system. The first part of the paper gives an overview of the proposed conceptual framework for system characterization. The second part presents an initial top-level characterization of the system, by using this framework, and offers some preliminary suggestions or recommendations. Finally, next steps in the research process are outlined, placing the paper in the larger context of the task on system characterization and transformation

A Structural Analysis of Star-Forming Region AFGL 490

We present Spitzer IRAC and MIPS observations of the star-forming region containing intermediate-mass young stellar object (YSO) AFGL 490. We supplement these data with near-IR 2MASS photometry and with deep SQIID observations off the central high extinction region. We have more than doubled the known membership of this region to 57 Class I and 303 Class II YSOs via the combined 1-24 um photometric catalog derived from these data. We construct and analyze the minimum spanning tree of their projected positions, isolating one locally over-dense cluster core containing 219 YSOs (60.8% of the region's members). We find this cluster core to be larger yet less dense than similarly analyzed clusters. Although the structure of this cluster core appears irregular, we demonstrate that the parsec-scale surface densities of both YSOs and gas are correlated with a power law slope of 2.8, as found for other similarly analyzed nearby molecular clouds. We also explore the mass segregation implications of AFGL 490's offset from the center of its core, finding that it has no apparent preferential central position relative to the low-mass members.Comment: 44 pages, 13 figures, accepted to Ap

Current Star Formation in the Ophiuchus and Perseus Molecular Clouds: Constraints and Comparisons from Unbiased Submillimeter and Mid-Infrared Surveys. II

We present a census of the population of deeply embedded young stellar objects (YSOs) in the Ophiuchus molecular cloud complex based on a combination of Spitzer Space Telescope mid-infrared data from the "Cores to Disks" (c2d) legacy team and JCMT/SCUBA submillimeter maps from the COMPLETE team. We have applied a method developed for identifying embedded protostars in Perseus to these datasets and in this way construct a relatively unbiased sample of 27 candidate embedded protostars with envelopes more massive than our sensitivity limit (about 0.1 M_sun). Embedded YSOs are found in 35% of the SCUBA cores - less than in Perseus (58%). On the other hand the mid-infrared sources in Ophiuchus have less red mid-infrared colors, possibly indicating that they are less embedded. We apply a nearest neighbor surface density algorithm to define the substructure in each of the clouds and calculate characteristic numbers for each subregion - including masses, star formation efficiencies, fraction of embedded sources etc. Generally the main clusters in Ophiuchus and Perseus (L1688, NGC1333 and IC348) are found to have higher star formation efficiencies than small groups such as B1, L1455 and L1448, which on the other hand are completely dominated by deeply embedded protostars. We discuss possible explanations for the differences between the regions in Perseus and Ophiuchus, such as different evolutionary timescales for the YSOs or differences, e.g., in the accretion in the two clouds.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ (56 pages, 13 figures; abstract abridged). Version with full-resolution figures available at http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~jes/paper120.pd

Importance of Explicit Vectorization for CPU and GPU Software Performance

Much of the current focus in high-performance computing is on multi-threading, multi-computing, and graphics processing unit (GPU) computing. However, vectorization and non-parallel optimization techniques, which can often be employed additionally, are less frequently discussed. In this paper, we present an analysis of several optimizations done on both central processing unit (CPU) and GPU implementations of a particular computationally intensive Metropolis Monte Carlo algorithm. Explicit vectorization on the CPU and the equivalent, explicit memory coalescing, on the GPU are found to be critical to achieving good performance of this algorithm in both environments. The fully-optimized CPU version achieves a 9x to 12x speedup over the original CPU version, in addition to speedup from multi-threading. This is 2x faster than the fully-optimized GPU version.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figure

Drug crime: statistics for England and Wales.

This briefing paper looks at drug crime prevalence in England and Wales and the criminal justice outcomes for those found guilty of drug offences. It also covers the impacts of drug misuse