Commentary on Child Welfare Waivers: The Stakes for Families

The purpose of this piece is to provide commentary of an article, Child Welfare Waivers: The Stakes for Your State, that discusses the recent reauthorization of the Title IV-E Child Welfare Waivers. The article provides an overview of funds available to the states for child welfare programs and their intended purpose and restrictions placed on use. As structured, the present system rewards states monetarily for maintaining foster care. Research from waiver programs shows promising results for improved outcomes at the same or lower financial cost by utilizing safe, proven alternatives to the current foster care system. Waiver funds also protect the financial commitment to child welfare because state legislative budget slashing in this area will result in the loss of Federal funding. The independent analysis required with the grant of a waiver must be maintained to provide ongoing analysis and oversight of the increase spending flexibility. Stakeholders must be aware of the program and its results and use these funds as an opportunity to assess new concepts and apply programs best suited to the needs of children in their state. Allowing those “on the ground” to determine appropriate programming and careful result assessment may be the best means for protecting children, preserving families and doing both in a manner that makes the most efficient use of available resources

Domestic Farm Policy For 2007: Forces for Change

Agricultural and Food Policy, Q18,

A simple family of nonadditive quantum codes

Most known quantum codes are additive, meaning the codespace can be described as the simultaneous eigenspace of an abelian subgroup of the Pauli group. While in some scenarios such codes are strictly suboptimal, very little is understood about how to construct nonadditive codes with good performance. Here we present a family of nonadditive quantum codes for all odd blocklengths, n, that has a particularly simple form. Our codes correct single qubit erasures while encoding a higher dimensional space than is possible with an additive code or, for n of 11 or greater, any previous codes.Comment: 3 pages, new version with slight clarifications, no results are change

Colourful stories: exploring the transformative potential of colour culture in a Northumbrian mining town

2014 will see the opening of a new £100m factory in Ashington, a former mining town in Northumbria, UK. The global paint manufacturer AkzoNobel wants to ensure its investment creates not only regeneration through employment but also broader, long-term health and wellbeing improvements, through the life-enhancing qualities of colour. Committed to transforming lives through colour, they are continually striving for innovative ways to engage local communities in transformative application of colour to the built environment. This paper describes successes of the firm’s global Let’s Colour programme, as well as the Northumberland project, its methodology, preliminary findings and proposals. The best will be developed and implemented over three years from 2014

Factors in health initiative success: Learning from Nepal’s newborn survival initiative

What determines the success of health initiatives in acquiring sufficient levels of political priority to alleviate significant health problems in low-income countries? We investigate this question in the context of significantly increasing political priority for newborn survival in Nepal since the turn of the century. We use a process-tracing methodology to investigate the causes of this shift, drawing on twentynine interviews with individuals close to newborn health policymaking in Nepal and extensive document analysis