The Effects of Vocational Rehabilitation for People with Mental Illlness

: The public-sector Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) program is a $3 billion federal-state partnership designed to provide employment-related assistance to persons with disabilities. There is, however, relatively little-known about the long-term efficacy of VR programs. This paper utilizes unique and detailed administrative and employment data to examine both short and longer-term employment impacts for all persons diagnosed with mental illness who applied for VR services in the state of Virginia in State Fiscal Year 2000. These data provide quarterly information on VR services and employment outcomes from 1995 to 2010. Estimates from our model of service provision and labor market outcomes reveal that VR services generally have positive long-run labor market outcome effects that appear to substantially exceed the cost of providing services.etraining, mental illness, treatment effects

The KELT-South Telescope

The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) project is a survey for new transiting planets around bright stars. KELT-South is a small-aperture, wide-field automated telescope located at Sutherland, South Africa. The telescope surveys a set of 26 degree by 26 degree fields around the southern sky, and targets stars in the range of 8 < V < 10 mag, searching for transits by Hot Jupiters. This paper describes the KELT-South system hardware and software and discusses the quality of the observations. We show that KELT-South is able to achieve the necessary photometric precision to detect transits of Hot Jupiters around solar-type main-sequence stars.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figure

Powered Wheelchair Platform for Assistive Technology Development

Literature shows that numerous wheelchair platforms, of various complexities, have been developed and evaluated for Assistive Technology purposes. However there has been little consideration to providing researchers with an embedded system which is fully compatible, and communicates seamlessly with current manufacturer's wheelchair systems. We present our powered wheelchair platform which allows researchers to mount various inertial and environment sensors, and run guidance and navigation algorithms which can modify the human desired joystick trajectory, so as to assist users with negotiating obstacles, and moving from room to room. We are also able to directly access other currently manufactured human input devices and integrate new and novel input devices into the powered wheelchair platform for clinical and research assessment

Chesapeake Bay Nutria Eradication Project: 2017 Update

Nutria, a semi-aquatic, South American rodent, was introduced to Maryland during the early 1940s. Originally brought to the area for fur farms, the market never established and animals were released or escaped. Nutria thrived, destroying coastal wetlands which resulted in negative environmental and economic impacts to the Chesapeake Bay region. To preserve and protect valuable wetland resources, the Chesapeake Bay Nutria Eradication Project (CBNEP) was established in 2002 through a partnership between the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services, Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and many state agencies and non-governmental organizations. Since inception, the CBNEP has removed and reduced nutria populations to near zero across ¼ million acres of wetlands throughout the Delmarva Peninsula (Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia). The CBNEP has aided in the protection of critical natural resources and provided assistance to over 400 private landowners. Throughout its history, the CBNEP has developed new detection techniques and modified existing methods as the nature of the eradication effort changed. We provide a project overview and detail several observer-based and device-based methods that were developed and used for detection of nutria including: shoreline and ground surveys, monitoring platforms, detector dogs, lure development and remote triggered cameras