Can Savings Help Overcome Income Instability?

Analyzes the extent of instability in monthly income among low-income families, the risk of facing material hardship due to income volatility, and whether modest liquid assets offers protection from such hardship. Considers policy implications

Assessing the Evidence About Work Support Benefits and Low-Income Families

Reviews research on factors affecting participation in work supports such as Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, and childcare subsidy programs; the programs' payoff, and state benefits of modernized delivery systems

Evaluation of the American Dream Demonstration: Impacts of IDAs on Participant Savings and Asset Ownership

Evaluation of the American Dream Demonstration: Impacts of IDAs on Participant Savings and Asset Ownershi

The BURCHAK corpus: a Challenge Data Set for Interactive Learning of Visually Grounded Word Meanings

We motivate and describe a new freely available human-human dialogue dataset for interactive learning of visually grounded word meanings through ostensive definition by a tutor to a learner. The data has been collected using a novel, character-by-character variant of the DiET chat tool (Healey et al., 2003; Mills and Healey, submitted) with a novel task, where a Learner needs to learn invented visual attribute words (such as " burchak " for square) from a tutor. As such, the text-based interactions closely resemble face-to-face conversation and thus contain many of the linguistic phenomena encountered in natural, spontaneous dialogue. These include self-and other-correction, mid-sentence continuations, interruptions, overlaps, fillers, and hedges. We also present a generic n-gram framework for building user (i.e. tutor) simulations from this type of incremental data, which is freely available to researchers. We show that the simulations produce outputs that are similar to the original data (e.g. 78% turn match similarity). Finally, we train and evaluate a Reinforcement Learning dialogue control agent for learning visually grounded word meanings, trained from the BURCHAK corpus. The learned policy shows comparable performance to a rule-based system built previously.Comment: 10 pages, THE 6TH WORKSHOP ON VISION AND LANGUAGE (VL'17

Mass Casualty Incident Response and Aeromedical Evacuation in Antarctica

Antarctica is one of the most remote regions on Earth. Mass casualty incident (MCI) responses in Antarctica are prone to complications from multiple environmental and operational challenges. This review of the current status of MCI risks and response strategies for Antarctica focuses on aeromedical evacuation, a critical component of many possible MCI scenarios. Extreme cold and weather, a lack of medical resources and a multitude of disparate international bases all exert unique demands on MCI response planning. Increasing cruise ship traffic is also escalating the risk of MCI occurrence. To be successful, MCI response must be well coordinated and undertaken by trained rescuers, especially in the setting of Antarctica. Helicopter rescue or aeromedical evacuation of victims to off-continent facilities may be necessary. Currently, military forces have the greatest capacity for mass air evacuation. Specific risks that are likely to occur include structure collapses, vehicle incapacitations, vehicle crashes and fires. All of these events pose concomitant risks of hypothermia among both victims and rescuers. Antarctica’s unique environment requires flexible yet robust MCI response planning among the many entities in operation on the continent

Amplifying signals of misunderstanding improves coordination in dialogue

We report a dialogue task which investigates how the mechanisms of miscommunication contribute toward referential coordination. Participants communicate via a text-based instant messaging tool which is used to identify turns that were edited prior to sending. These turns are transformed by the server into artificial self-corrections, and sent to the participants. The patterns observed in the dialogues show that these interventions have a beneficial effect on referential coordination.</p