Characteristics of Effective Employment Services: The Consumers’ Perspective

This monograph reports on a study investigating the characteristics of effective state service systems. Findings are based on the experiences of individuals with disabilities who have used a state agency (Vocational Rehabilitation, Department of Mental Retardation, Department of Mental Health, or One Stop Center) to find employment. Interviews were conducted to examine individuals\u27 experiences with employment services including job search, job entry, strategies that facilitated involvement, supports provided, and barriers experienced. Findings indicated five key components to effective service delivery, including agency culture, consumer-directedness, access to resources, quality personnel, and coordinated services. Obstacles faced during the employment process and personal strategies used to overcome these barriers were also identified. These findings provide information about what job seekers and state systems can do to maximize their experience together. Recommendations for what both parties can do independently and collaboratively to achieve success are offered

Research to Practice: Building a Future: Working with the Post-High School Expectations of Students & Parents

This brief examined the circumstances that accompany high expectations for the future for Massachusetts high school students who receive special education services and their parents. Includes recommendations on how to build and fulfill students\u27 goals for adulthood

Nursing Skin Integrity Guidelines: A New Approach to Skin Care

What is nursing skin integrity guidelines: a nursing driven order to provide evidence based skin integrity interventions; provides a streamlined process for immediate application of best practice interventions for identified skin impairments; the interventions can be implemented based on assessment findings and clinical judgment; and provides a guideline for consulting the WOC Nurse, including when wounds are not healing, all pressure ulcers, and ostomy needs.https://digitalcommons.centracare.com/nursing_posters/1028/thumbnail.jp

Tools for Inclusion: Stories of Success: Using Networking and Mentoring Relationships in Career Planning for Students with Disabilities and Their Families

This brief gives examples of how students and families have successfully used networking and mentoring to learn about jobs and find employment, and gives students tools to build and use their personal networks throughout the career planning process

Vocational Rehabilitation Outcomes for People with Mental Retardation, Cerebral Palsy, and Epilepsy: An Analysis of Trends from 1985 to 1998

This monograph presents the results of secondary analysis of the RSA-911 database from the Rehabilitation Services Administration. All successful VR closures for individuals with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, and epilepsy for six data points between 1985 and 1998 were investigated. Trends in competitive labor market and extended employment (sheltered workshops) closures were examined. The use of supported employment in the VR system and its outcomes were also discussed. Findings include increased incidence of competitive labor market closures and supported employment services, with a decrease in extended employment closures. Comparisons of successful VR closure outcomes to trends in the general labor market were also made. A significant inverse correlation between VR competitive labor market closure rates and national unemployment rates suggests that VR closures rise and decline with the performance of the general economy. The data also indicated a decrease in real (inflation adjusted) earnings at closure of 43% over the study time period. While there was also a decrease in real earnings for the general population, the decrease was more severe for VR closures

Expectations over Unspoken Alternatives Predict Pragmatic Inferences

Scalar inferences (SI) are a signature example of how humans interpret language based on unspoken alternatives. While empirical studies have demonstrated that human SI rates are highly variable -- both within instances of a single scale, and across different scales -- there have been few proposals that quantitatively explain both cross- and within-scale variation. Furthermore, while it is generally assumed that SIs arise through reasoning about unspoken alternatives, it remains debated whether humans reason about alternatives as linguistic forms, or at the level of concepts. Here, we test a shared mechanism explaining SI rates within and across scales: context-driven expectations about the unspoken alternatives. Using neural language models to approximate human predictive distributions, we find that SI rates are captured by the expectedness of the strong scalemate as an alternative. Crucially, however, expectedness robustly predicts cross-scale variation only under a meaning-based view of alternatives. Our results suggest that pragmatic inferences arise from context-driven expectations over alternatives, and these expectations operate at the level of concepts.Comment: To appear in TACL (pre-MIT Press publication version

Lessons Learned in the Selection and Development of Test Cases for the Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop: Rectangular Supercritical Wing

The Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop brought together an international community of computational fluid dynamicists as a step in defining the state of the art in computational aeroelasticity. The Rectangular Supercritical Wing (RSW) was chosen as the first configuration to study due to its geometric simplicity, perceived simple flow field at transonic conditions and availability of an experimental data set containing forced oscillation response data. Six teams performed analyses of the RSW; they used Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes flow solvers exercised assuming that the wing had a rigid structure. Both steady-state and forced oscillation computations were performed by each team. The results of these calculations were compared with each other and with the experimental data. The steady-state results from the computations capture many of the flow features of a classical supercritical airfoil pressure distribution. The most dominant feature of the oscillatory results is the upper surface shock dynamics. Substantial variations were observed among the computational solutions as well as differences relative to the experimental data. Contributing issues to these differences include substantial wind tunnel wall effects and diverse choices in the analysis parameters

Overview of the Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop

The AIAA Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop (AePW) was held in April, 2012, bringing together communities of aeroelasticians and computational fluid dynamicists. The objective in conducting this workshop on aeroelastic prediction was to assess state-of-the-art computational aeroelasticity methods as practical tools for the prediction of static and dynamic aeroelastic phenomena. No comprehensive aeroelastic benchmarking validation standard currently exists, greatly hindering validation and state-of-the-art assessment objectives. The workshop was a step towards assessing the state of the art in computational aeroelasticity. This was an opportunity to discuss and evaluate the effectiveness of existing computer codes and modeling techniques for unsteady flow, and to identify computational and experimental areas needing additional research and development. Three configurations served as the basis for the workshop, providing different levels of geometric and flow field complexity. All cases considered involved supercritical airfoils at transonic conditions. The flow fields contained oscillating shocks and in some cases, regions of separation. The computational tools principally employed Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes solutions. The successes and failures of the computations and the experiments are examined in this paper