From Getting By to Getting Ahead: Navigating Career Advancement for Low-Wage Workers

From just getting by at the end of each month to getting ahead is a hard climb for many low-wage workers. This report, from MDRC's Work Advancement and Support Center (WASC) demonstration, explores how WASC career coaches help low-wage workers understand the complex interactions between earnings and eligibility for work support programs and guide them to make the best advancement decisions possible

Moving from Jobs to Careers: Engaging Low-Wage Workers in Career Advancement

The Work Advancement and Support Center (WASC) demonstration offers a new approach to helping low-wage and dislocated workers advance by increasing their wages or work hours, upgrading their skills, or finding better jobs. At the same time, these workers are encouraged to augment and stabilize their income by making the most of available work supports, such as food stamps, public health insurance, subsidized child care, and tax credits. This report presents preliminary information on the effectiveness of strategies that were used to attract people to the WASC program and engage them in services

Strategies to Help Low-Wage Workers Advance: Implementation and Early Impacts of the Work Advancement and Support Center (WASC) Demonstration

Work Advancement and Support Center (WASC) is an innovative strategy to help low-wage workers increase their incomes by stabilizing employment, improving skills, increasing earnings, and easing access to work supports. In its first year, WASC connected more workers to food stamps and publicly funded health care coverage and, in one site, substantially increased training activities

Impact of Si nanocrystals in a-SiOx<Er> in C-Band emission for applications in resonators structures

Si nanocrystals (Si-NC) in a-SiOx were created by high temperature annealing. Si-NC samples have large emission in a broadband region, 700nm to 1000nm. Annealing temperature, annealing time, substrate type, and erbium concentration is studied to allow emission at 1550 nm forsamples with erbium. Emission in the C-Band region is largely reduced by the presence of Si-NC. This reduction may be due to less efficient energy transfer processes from the nanocrystals than from the amorphous matrix to the Er3+ ions, perhaps due to the formation of more centro-symmetric Er3+ sites at the nanocrystal surfaces or to very different optimal erbium concentrations between amorphous and crystallized samples.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figure

Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modelling perspective

Human communication has been described as a contextual social inference process. Research into great ape communication has been inspired by this view to look for the evolutionary roots of the social, cognitive and interactional processes involved in human communication. This approach has been highly productive, yet it is partly compromised by the widespread focus on how great apes use and understand individual signals. This paper introduces a computational model that formalizes great ape communication as a multi-faceted social inference process that integrates (a) information contained in the signals that make up an utterance, (b) the relationship between communicative partners and (c) the social context. This model makes accurate qualitative and quantitative predictions about real-world communicative interactions between semi-wild-living chimpanzees. When enriched with a pragmatic reasoning process, the model explains repeatedly reported differences between humans and great apes in the interpretation of ambiguous signals (e.g. pointing or iconic gestures). This approach has direct implications for observational and experimental studies of great ape communication and provides a new tool for theorizing about the evolution of uniquely human communication. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Revisiting the human ‘interaction engine’: comparative approaches to social action coordination’

A quadrilateral inverse-shell element with drilling degrees of freedom for shape sensing and structural health monitoring

The inverse Finite Element Method (iFEM) is a state-of-the-art methodology originally introduced by Tessler and Spangler for real-time reconstruction of full-field structural displacements in plate and shell structures that are instrumented by strain sensors. This inverse problem is commonly known as shape sensing. In this effort, a new four-node quadrilateral inverse-shell element, iQS4, is developed that expands the library of existing iFEM-based elements. This new element includes hierarchical drilling rotation degrees-of-freedom (DOF) and further extends the practical usefulness of iFEM for shape sensing analysis of large-scale structures. The iFEM/iQS4 formulation is derived from a weighted-least-squares functional that has Mindlin theory as its kinematic framework. Two validation problems, (1) a cantilevered plate under static transverse force near the free tip, and (2) a short cantilever beam under shear loading, are solved and discussed in detail. Following the validation cases, the applicability of the iQS4 element to more complex structures is demonstrated by the analysis of a thin-walled cylinder. For this problem, the effects of noisy strain measurements on the accuracy of the iFEM solution are examined using strain measurements that involve five and ten percent random noise, respectively. Finally, the effect of sensor locations, number of sensors, the discretization of the geometry, and the influence of noise on the strain measurements are assessed with respect to the solution accuracy

Resonant structures based on amorphous silicon sub-oxide doped with Er3+ with silicon nanoclusters for an efficient emission at 1550 nm

We present a resonant approach to enhance 1550nm emission efficiency of amorphous silicon sub-oxide doped with Er3+ (a-SiOx) layers with silicon nanoclusters (Si-NC). Two distinct techniques were combined to provide a structure that allowed increasing approximately 12x the 1550nm emission. First, layers of SiO2 were obtained by conventional wet oxidation and a-SiOx matrix was deposited by reactive RF co-sputtering. Secondly, an extra pump channel (4I15/2 to 4I9/2) of Er3+ was created due to Si-NC formation on the same a-SiOx matrix via a hard annealing at 1150 C. The SiO2 and the a-SiOx thicknesses were designed to support resonances near the pumping wavelength (~500nm), near the Si-NC emission (~800nm) and near the a-SiOx emission (~1550nm) enhancing the optical pumping process.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, in submissio

Encouraging Evidence on a Sector-Focused Advancement Strategy: Two-Year Impacts from the WorkAdvance Demonstration

This report summarizes the two-year findings of a rigorous random assignment evaluation of the WorkAdvance model, a sectoral training and advancement initiative. Launched in 2011, WorkAd-vance goes beyond the previous generation of employment programs by introducing demand-driven skills training and a focus on jobs that have career pathways. The model is heavily influenced by the positive findings from the Sectoral Employment Impact Study (SEIS) completed in 2010. A major component of the WorkAdvance model, in common with the programs studied in the SEIS, is formal training offering industry-recognized certifications, reflecting the hypothesis that skills acquisition is necessary for advancement. The model also requires providers to be far more employer-facing than traditional training programs, taking into account multiple employers' changing skill requirements, employee assessment practices, and personnel needs. This report presents the imple-mentation, cost, participation, and two-year economic impacts of WorkAdvance. The economic results are based on unemployment insurance earnings records and a second-year follow-up survey.The WorkAdvance program operations and evaluation are funded through the federal Social Innovation Fund (SIF), a public-private partnership administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service. This SIF project is led by the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City and the NYC Center for Economic Opportunity in collaboration with MDRC.Key Findings*All providers translated the WorkAdvance model into a set of concrete services, but it took time— more than a year for some components and providers -- and a substantial amount of tech-nical assistance and support. As a result, at some sites, later study enrollees were more likely than earlier ones to experience a fully implemented and "mature" WorkAdvance program.*Overall, WorkAdvance resulted in very large increases in participation in every category of services, as well as in training completion and credential acquisition, compared with what would have happened in the absence of the program. Expenditures for the operation of WorkAdvance fell between $5,200 and$6,700 per participant at the four providers delivering the program.*WorkAdvance providers increased earnings, with variation in results that closely matched the providers' experience in running sector-based programs and the extent to which the services they offered were demand driven. The most experienced sectoral provider, Per Scholas, had large and consistent impacts on both primary and secondary outcomes. Madison Strategies Group and Towards Employment, providers new to sectoral training, had promising but less consistent results that grew stronger for later enrollees. One provider, St. Nicks Alliance, did not produce positive impacts. The results did not differ dramatically across subgroups, though en-couragingly, WorkAdvance was able to increase earnings among the long-term unemployed.The evaluation as a whole provides important information for workforce development providers interested in pursuing a sector strategy. The analysis considers the role played by providers' sector-specific training and preparation and the role played by the nature of the sectors themselves. Future priorities that emerge from the results are (1) understanding how to help the more disadvantaged access the programs and (2) learning how to build service capacity, given how complex the model is to run

Dual overflows into the deep Sulu Sea

The Sulu Sea, isolated from the neighboring ocean below 570 m, is nearly isothermal below 1250 m but with a marked salinity increase with depth. The source of the deep Sulu Sea water has been attributed to South China Sea water overflowing the 570 m topographic sill of Panay Strait. However, the Panay overflow (estimated as 0.32 × 106 m3/sec) is an unlikely source for the saltier water Sulu Sea deep water. We propose that deep Sulu Sea ventilation is derived from the south, from the Sulawesi Sea through Sibutu Passage. Sulawesi Sea water between 245 to 527 m, is mixed and heaved over the Sibutu Passage 234 m sill by the energetic tidal environment. Oxygen concentrations within the deep Sulu Sea suggest that the Sulawesi overflow is 0.15 × 106 m3/sec, with a residence time of Sulu Sea deep water of 60 years. The deep tropical Sulu Sea has the unique distinction of being ventilated from two separate sources, whose ratio may fluctuate across a range of temporal scales, associated with regional thermocline depth changes

Size dependent tunneling and optical spectroscopy of CdSe quantum rods

Photoluminescence excitation spectroscopy and scanning tunneling spectroscopy are used to study the electronic states in CdSe quantum rods that manifest a transition from a zero dimensional to a one dimensional quantum confined structure. Both optical and tunneling spectra show that the level structure depends primarily on the rod diameter and not on length. With increasing diameter, the band-gap and the excited state level spacings shift to the red. The level structure was assigned using a multi-band effective-mass model, showing a similar dependence on rod dimensions.Comment: Accepted to PRL (nearly final version). 4 pages in revtex, 4 figure