Weathering Job Loss: Unemployment Insurance

Suggests extending unemployment insurance widely to low-wage workers by changing eligibility rules favoring full-time, higher-wage earners who are let go. Outlines proposed reforms, remaining issues, and costs and benefits to the families and to society

The Librarian in Bibliotherapy: Pharmacist or Bibliotherapist?

published or submitted for publicatio

Promoting Public and Private Reinvestment in Cultural Exchange-Based Diplomacy

Makes the case for renewed investment in public diplomacy and cultural exchange. Analyzes trends in government, foundation, and other private support for cultural diplomacy, the benefits and obstacles, and models of engagement. Details recommendations

Using space photography of the Earth in the classroom: Drought in Africa

A script of a classroom presentation based on space photographs of Africa is presented. The intended audience is elementary and secondary school teachers. Photographs of Lake Chad are used to illustrate climatic developments that exemplify the African drought problem

Losing the Battle: The Challenges of Military Suicide

This report, by Dr. Margaret Harrell, CNAS Senior Fellow and Director of the Joining Forces Initiative, and Nancy Berglass, CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow, suggests that the health of the all-volunteer force is dependent on our nation's ability to take care of its service members and veterans.According to the report, "Suicide among service members and veterans challenges the health of America's all-volunteer force." From 2005 to 2010, service members took their own lives at a rate of approximately one every 36 hours. This tragic phenomenon reached new extremes when the Army reported a record-high number of suicides in July 2011 with the deaths of 33 active and reserve component service members reported as suicides. Additionally, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates 18 veterans die by suicide each day. Yet the true number of veterans who die by suicide, as Harrell and Berglass point out, is unknown. As more American troops return home from war, this issue will require increasingly urgent attention. Harrell and Berglass present a number of concrete policy recommendations that will help reduce the number of service member and veteran suicides, including establishing an Army unit cohesion period; removing the congressional restriction on unit leaders discussing personally owned weapons with service members; and increasing coordination between the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to improve the analysis of veteran suicide data. Despite the efforts of the DOD and the VA to address military suicide, obstacles remain, and policymakers must bring a renewed urgency to their efforts if America is to both honor the sacrifices made by the all-volunteer force and protect its future health and ability to defend the nation

Metastability and rapid convergence to quasi-stationary bar states for the 2D Navier-Stokes Equations

Quasi-stationary, or metastable, states play an important role in two-dimensional turbulent fluid flows where they often emerge on time-scales much shorter than the viscous time scale, and then dominate the dynamics for very long time intervals. In this paper we propose a dynamical systems explanation of the metastability of an explicit family of solutions, referred to as bar states, of the two-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equation on the torus. These states are physically relevant because they are associated with certain maximum entropy solutions of the Euler equations, and they have been observed as one type of metastable state in numerical studies of two-dimensional turbulence. For small viscosity (high Reynolds number), these states are quasi-stationary in the sense that they decay on the slow, viscous timescale. Linearization about these states leads to a time-dependent operator. We show that if we approximate this operator by dropping a higher-order, non-local term, it produces a decay rate much faster than the viscous decay rate. We also provide numerical evidence that the same result holds for the full linear operator, and that our theoretical results give the optimal decay rate in this setting.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures. Version 3: minor error from version 2 correcte

Employing America's Veterans: Perspectives from Businesses

Employment is an important aspect of reintegration into civilian society for many transitioning service members. Despite general American goodwill and intent to support veterans, many companies must emphasize business-related reasons to hire veterans. Thus, any effort to improve veteran employment outcomes must consider employer perspectives and the institutions and processes in place to facilitate and incentivize the hiring of veterans.This report provides empirical data representing the experiences of 69 companies of varying size, location and industry. In this report, the authors discuss to what extent, and for what reasons, employers think it is good business to hire veterans. Additionally, from the experiences of those employers who hesitate or have concerns about hiring veterans, Harrell and Berglass also describe the challenges to veteran employment and make recommendations for policy changes to improve the employment situation of veterans

The evolution of the 1952 nursing practice act in the state of Rhode Island and Providence plantations.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Testing based on the RELAY model of error detection

RELAY, a model for error detection, defines revealing conditions that guarantee that a fault originates an error during execution and that the error transfers through computations and data flow until it is revealed. This model of error detection provides a fault-based criterion for test data selection. The model is applied by choosing a fault classification, instantiating the conditions for the classes of faults, and applying them to the program being tested. Such an application guarantees the detection of errors caused by any fault of the chosen classes. As a formal mode of error detection, RELAY provides the basis for an automated testing tool. This paper presents the concepts behind RELAY, describes why it is better than other fault-based testing criteria, and discusses how RELAY could be used as the foundation for a testing system

An analysis of test data selection criteria using the RELAY model of fault detection

RELAY is a model of faults and failures that defines failure conditions, which describe test data for which execution will guarantee that a fault originates erroneous behavior that also transfers through computations and information flow until a failure is revealed. This model of fault detection provides a framework within which other testing criteria's capabilities can be evaluated. In this paper, we analyze three test data selection criteria that attempt to detect faults in six fault classes. This analysis shows that none of these criteria is capable of guaranteeing detection for these fault classes and points out two major weaknesses of these criteria. The first weakness is that the criteria do not consider the potential unsatisfiability of their rules; each criterion includes rules that are sufficient to cause potential failures for some fault classes, yet when such rules are unsatisfiable, many faults may remain undetected. Their second weakness is failure to integrate their proposed rules; although a criterion may cause a subexpression to take on an erroneous value, there is no effort made to guarantee that the intermediate values cause observable, erroneous behavior. This paper shows how the RELAY model overcomes these weaknesses