Boosting the Life Chances of Young Men of Color: Evidence From Promising Programs

In light of the momentum building to improve the fortunes of young men of color, this review examines what is known about this population -- particularly related to their struggles in the labor market -- and highlights programs that are shown by randomized controlled trials to be making a difference

Child Care Expenses Push Many Families Into Poverty

In this fact sheet, authors Marybeth Mattingly and Christopher Wimer use the Supplemental Poverty Measure to assess the extent to which child care costs are pushing families with young children into poverty or preventing them from escaping it. They focus on families with at least one child under age 6 who report any child care expenditures. They report that one third of poor families who pay for child care for their young children are pushed into poverty by their child care expenses. Families most often pushed into poverty by child care expenses include households with three or more children, those headed by a single parent, those with a black or Hispanic head of household, and those headed by someone with less than a high school degree or by someone who does not work full time. Their findings suggest that lowering out-of-pocket child care expenses for families with young children would serve to reduce poverty. Additionally, things like increased subsidies may expand access to higher quality child care or open the door to increased labor force participation

Child Care Expenses Make Middle-Class Incomes Hard to Reach

In this brief, authors Robert Paul Hartley, Marybeth Mattingly, and Christopher Wimer present estimates of the number of families that cannot maintain a middle-class income as a result of child care expenses. Estimates are based on 2013–2017 data from the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement, which corresponds to income and expenses during 2012–2016. They report that approximately 9 percent of working families with children under age 6 are pushed out of the middle class as a result of child care expenses. For working families with very young children (under age 3), 8 percent are pushed below the middle-class threshold. If all middle-class working families with young children were to pay what typical upper-middle and middle-class families pay for child care, roughly $6,900 per year on average, an additional 21 percent would be pushed below the middle-class threshold. They report that the current funding infrastructure for helping parents find and pay for affordable, quality child care is woefully inadequate. One way to support working families would be to increase funding for the Child Care and Development Fund, which is currently targeted toward families below the middle class

Data Snapshot: Poorer Working Families with Young Children and No Out-of-Pocket Child Care Struggle Financially

Low-income families with working parents face significant burdens paying for child care, which can function as a barrier to work and often means parents must rely on child care arrangements that are less formal and less stable

Ask the Better Question: Using Bigfoot to Introduce Constructive Approaches to Authority

Librarians know that authority is constructed and contextual, but getting our students there can feel as elusive as Sasquatch himself. Our Bigfoot-themed classroom activity pursues a strengths-based approach, challenging increasing incredulity for new information and checklist research mentalities among our undergraduates. It asks students to ignore the good source/bad source dichotomy in favor of the question, What can I learn from this source? . This session will explain how we started with the BEAM rhetorical framework, showcase our materials and method, and discuss our love of Bigfoot as an accessible topic for students learning to challenge their existing mindsets. Participants will: Contrast a positive constructive approach to authority in information sources with the more common deconstructive methods of evaluation. Engage with a specific classroom activity to consider how they might use a similar approach in their own instruction. Consider the benefit of using fantasy example topics in classroom activity and demonstration

Doing More for Our Children: Modeling a Universal Child Allowance or More Generous Child Tax Credit

Child poverty in the United States remains stubbornly high, with 12.2 million children living in poverty in 2013. Nearly 17 percent of children in the United States lived in poverty in 2013 -- a higher rate than for other age groups, and considerably higher than the child poverty rate in other advanced industrialized countries. The U.S. deep child poverty rate -- children who live in families with incomes less than half of the poverty line -- was 4.5 percent of all children in 2013, meaning nearly 1 in 20 children live in families that cannot even afford half of what is considered a minimally adequate living.One key policy for reducing child poverty is the child tax credit (CTC) -- which reduces the child poverty rate from 18.8 percent to 16.5 percent of American children. There is broad acceptance of the importance of the CTC, and key expansions to the CTC were made permanent at the end of 2015. At a moment when leaders ranging from President Barack Obama to Speaker Paul Ryan are talking about poverty, now is an opportune time to explore policy options that would build on this success. This report models two approaches to reduce child poverty in the United States even further -- a universal child allowance and an expanded CTC.A universal child allowance is a cash benefit that is provided to all families with children without regard to their income, earnings, or other qualifying conditions, and that could be subject to taxes for families with high incomes. The U.S. child tax credit, in contrast, is provided only to families that meet a threshold for earnings, phasing in as earnings increase and then phasing out as earnings rise higher. While most other advanced industrialized countries have some kind of universal support for children, the United States does not.For each approach, we begin with a modest reform, and then model increasingly generous versions. In our simulations, we find that even the modest reforms generate important poverty reductions. Our results also make clear that the more we spend on these programs, the greater the reduction in poverty the United States can achieve

A Global sensitivity analysis of photochemical models used for predicting tropospheric ozone

The Clean Air Act requires the use of complex photochemical models to predict future ozone concentrations and the impact of current and future regulations. In many instances uncertainty in the data input parameters used to operate these models results in uncertainty in the prediction of future air quality. The degree of this uncertainty is often greater than the degreee of air quality improvements proposed by regulations. This study evaluates the sensitivity of a photochemical model to predict future ozone air quality with respect to the uncertainty of several critical input parameters. These parameters are: Transported ozone (ozone aloft) Biogenic emissions (naturally occurring in nature) and anthropogenic (man-made) emissions of oxides of nitrogen (NOx), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and carbon monoxide (CO). Global sensitivity analyses were done using the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Empirical Kinetic Modeling Approach (EKMA) photochemical model to assess the sensitivity in predictions of past (1990), present (1999), and future year (2010) air quality downwind of New York City. Our results show that for present and future years, the uncertainty in the model\u27s prediction of future air quality, (a consequence of the uncertainty in biogenic emissions and ozone aloft) is significantly greater than the difference in emissions as a result of different control strategies proposed by industry and the regulatory agencies for mobile source emissions. The model therefore is not accurate enough to be used to predict changes in air quality that are driven by the proposed more stringent regulations

Microbially Induced Sedimentary Structures as an Ecological Niche in Subtidal Early Triassic Environments of Eastern Panthalassa

Early Triassic microbially induced sedimentary structures (MISS) are a critical link in understanding the dynamics between changing environmental conditions and their effect on marine communities. The Permo-Triassic mass extinction (PTME) resulted in vacated ecospace and reduced bioturbation that allowed MISS to expand into Early Triassic subtidal environments. Data from southern Idaho and Montana indicate that MISS inhabited and proliferated in subtidal marine environments during the Griesbachian. This propagation led to changes in shallow substrate geochemical conditions that directly affected macrofaunal communities. The proliferation of microbial mats would have created anoxic and euxinic porewaters and made vertical bioturbation physiologically difficult. Geochemical data shows the bottom water signals associated with MISS were oxic to suboxic, but the porewaters below the microbial mat surface could have been anoxic even if the overlying water column was oxygenated. However, some metazoans adapted to these low-oxygen, shallow euxinic environments, allowing them to expand their ecological range during this period of crisis. Two metazoans with such adaptations were the lingulid brachiopods, which have the ability to oxidize hydrogen sulfide in their blood, and the bivalve Claraia, which was well suited to low oxygen environments. These specific disaster taxa, defined as opportunists that occupy vacated ecospaces during recovery periods but are subsequently forced into marginal settings when the recovery gains momentum, were found in direct contact with these MISS. These findings indicate that the subtidal proliferation of MISS during the Early Triassic provided an ecological niche in which specific metazoans had complex and extensive relationships

Decoding Virtual Reference: Using Chat Transcripts to Guide Usability Testing and Improve Web Design

This paper seeks to support user-centered library website design by exploring a low-effort strategy for identifying patron needs and the natural language used to describe them. The literature review cross-references library literature on chat reference with broader studies on website navigation and cognitive modeling, and briefly reviews other studies that have used chat transcript analysis as a usability tool. Word count analysis of two terms of chat reference transcripts showed several trends in patron language, particularly highlighting the benefits of usage-based navigational design. Recommendations for further usability testing are offered, as is an analysis of the method as a starting point for busy libraries