969 research outputs found
Nebraska Department of Social Services\u27 Child Support Enforcement Unit Demonstration Project: Final Evaluation Report
In July 1987, the Nebraska Department of Social Services successfully applied to the U.S. Family Support Administration\u27s Office of Child Support Enforcement for funds to conduct a Demonstration Project. This Demonstration Project, The Nebraska IV-D/IV-A Intake and Phone Collection Project, was designed to increase telephone activities and improve intake practice as part of the ongoing child support collection activities. It was expected that such improvements would result in an increased level of absent parent location and an increased level of child support payment
Progress Towards a NASA Earth Science Reuse Enablement System (RES)
A Reuse Enablement System (RES) allows developers of Earth science software to contribute software for reuse by others and.for users to find, select, and obtain software for reuse in their own systems. This paper describes work that the X4S,4 Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Software Reuse Working Group has completed to date in the development of an RES for NASA
Software Reuse Methods to Improve Technological Infrastructure for e-Science
Social computing has the potential to contribute to scientific research. Ongoing developments in information and communications technology improve capabilities for enabling scientific research, including research fostered by social computing capabilities. The recent emergence of e-Science practices has demonstrated the benefits from improvements in the technological infrastructure, or cyber-infrastructure, that has been developed to support science. Cloud computing is one example of this e-Science trend. Our own work in the area of software reuse offers methods that can be used to improve new technological development, including cloud computing capabilities, to support scientific research practices. In this paper, we focus on software reuse and its potential to contribute to the development and evaluation of information systems and related services designed to support new capabilities for conducting scientific research
A Laser Ultrasound System to Non-Invasively Measure Compression Waves in Granular Ice Mixes
Accurate knowledge of snow mechanical properties, including Young\u27s modulus, shear modulus, Poisson\u27s ratio, and density, is critical to many areas of snow science and to snow-related engineering problems. To facilitate the assessment of these properties, an innovative non-contacting laser ultrasound system (LUS) has been developed. This system acquires ultrasound waveform data at frequencies ranging from tens to hundreds of kHz in a controlled cold-lab environment. Two different LUS devices were compared in this study to determine which recorded more robust ultrasound in granular ice mix samples. We validated the ultrasound observations with poro-elastic traveltime modeling based on physical and empirical constitutive relationships, comparison to and replication of previous studies, and the use of other accredited snow property measurement systems, i.e., the SnowMicroPen. For ice mixes, we determined that the PSV-400 Scanning Vibrometer (Polytec GmbH) produces higher quality ultrasonic wavefield observations (i.e. has a better signal-to-noise ratio) than the VibroFlex Fiber Vibrometer (Polytec GmbH) in the lab conditions tested here. Using the PSV-400, we then demonstrated the utility of this new LUS to study the relationship between snow compression-wave speed and density during snow compaction experiments
Spectral weight contributions of many-particle bound states and continuum
Cluster expansion methods are developed for calculating the spectral weight
contributions of multiparticle excitations - continuum and bound states - to
high orders. A complete 11th order calculation is carried out for the
alternating Heisenberg chain. For , relevant to the material
, we present detailed spectral weights for the two-triplet
continuum and all bound states. We also examine variation of the relative
weights of one and two-particle states with bond alternation from the dimerized
to the uniform chain limit.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, revte
Red nuggets grow inside-out: evidence from gravitational lensing
We present a new sample of strong gravitational lens systems where both the
foreground lenses and background sources are early-type galaxies. Using imaging
from HST/ACS and Keck/NIRC2, we model the surface brightness distributions and
show that the sources form a distinct population of massive, compact galaxies
at redshifts , lying systematically below the
size-mass relation of the global elliptical galaxy population at those
redshifts. These may therefore represent relics of high-redshift red nuggets or
their partly-evolved descendants. We exploit the magnifying effect of lensing
to investigate the structural properties, stellar masses and stellar
populations of these objects with a view to understanding their evolution. We
model these objects parametrically and find that they generally require two
S\'ersic components to properly describe their light profiles, with one more
spheroidal component alongside a more envelope-like component, which is
slightly more extended though still compact. This is consistent with the
hypothesis of the inside-out growth of these objects via minor mergers. We also
find that the sources can be characterised by red-to-blue colour gradients as a
function of radius which are stronger at low redshift -- indicative of ongoing
accretion -- but that their environments generally appear consistent with that
of the general elliptical galaxy population, contrary to recent suggestions
that these objects are predominantly associated with clusters.Comment: 21 pages; accepted for publication in MNRA
Space Warps II. New Gravitational Lens Candidates from the CFHTLS Discovered through Citizen Science
We report the discovery of 29 promising (and 59 total) new lens candidates
from the CFHT Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) based on about 11 million classifications
performed by citizen scientists as part of the first Space Warps lens search.
The goal of the blind lens search was to identify lens candidates missed by
robots (the RingFinder on galaxy scales and ArcFinder on group/cluster scales)
which had been previously used to mine the CFHTLS for lenses. We compare some
properties of the samples detected by these algorithms to the Space Warps
sample and find them to be broadly similar. The image separation distribution
calculated from the Space Warps sample shows that previous constraints on the
average density profile of lens galaxies are robust. SpaceWarps recovers about
65% of known lenses, while the new candidates show a richer variety compared to
those found by the two robots. This detection rate could be increased to 80% by
only using classifications performed by expert volunteers (albeit at the cost
of a lower purity), indicating that the training and performance calibration of
the citizen scientists is very important for the success of Space Warps. In
this work we present the SIMCT pipeline, used for generating in situ a sample
of realistic simulated lensed images. This training sample, along with the
false positives identified during the search, has a legacy value for testing
future lens finding algorithms. We make the pipeline and the training set
publicly available.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, MNRAS accepted, minor to moderate changes in
this versio
Should coaches use personality assessments in the talent identification process? A 15 year predictive study on professional hockey players
Abstract Making an accurate and valid prediction about an athlete's long term success in professional sport is likely a difficult aspect of a professional coach's role. Therefore, to aid them in this evaluative process coaches routinely employ a battery of tests, all of which are intended to inform their eventual selection decision. To date however, personality inventories have yet to become common place within this evaluative process; and thus, their predictive utility within the talent identification process has not yet been adequately teste
By Shepherd, et all, posted on November 29th, 2013 in Articles, Climate
Earth is increasingly an “urbanized ” planet. The “World Population Clock ” registered a Population of 7,175,309,538 at 8:30 pm (LST) on Oct. 6, 2013. Current and future trends suggest that this population will increasingly reside in cities. Currently, 52 percent of the world population is urban, which means we are a majority “urbanized ” society. Figure 1 indicates this trend will continue, wit
- …