Using Prezi as a Library Instruction Tool

Prezi is a cloud-based presentation tool that is built with the help of many open source projects. Not only in Prezi free, but users also gain access to video tutorials, live online training sessions and webinars given by Prezi experts; and community forums where users can talk about problems, give tips, and learn from one another. Signing up for the “Edu Enjoy” account with an .edu email address provides additional benefits. This article will cover the features of Prezi, discuss pros and cons, and will conclude with ways to successfully incorporate Prezi into information literacy instruction sessions

The Role of Data in Organizing an Access to Justice Movement

reminds us that civil justice reform has to start with compelling human stories. She’s right. Building a movement requires drawing in the care and effort of those who previously had not seen the problem. A story of a mother and her family unjustly evicted from their home, of an older gentleman whose life savings are unjustly taken, or of a father fighting for visitation rights unjustly denied: each of these personal stories is an outrage and will often generate anger in the listener. Stories lead those who do not live the injustices of our civil justice system every day to ask: How can this be? Broad outrage, the “how can it be?” question, and the demand for answers and action, are the fuel of any social justice movement. But in a social justice movement, personal stories rarely allow us to see the complete picture. To change the system, we as advocates also need the wider communities in which we live to see that the personal stories are representative of thousands more that are the product of the same and related systemic failures. Individual acts of compassion for those whose stories we hear will not help the thousands whose stories we never hear. The “complete picture” of the lack of access to civil justice is that the problem is systemic and that fixing it will require big changes and concerted action

Selection Effects in the Market for Individual Annuities: New Evidence from the United Kingdom

This paper presents new evidence on the importance of adverse selection in individual annuity markets. It focuses on the individual annuity market in the United Kingdom, which provides an excellent empirical setting for studying selection effects. In addition to a voluntary annuity market, the U.K. also has a compulsory annuity market in which individuals in some types of retirement plans are effectively required to purchase retirement annuities. Two empirical regularities support standard models of adverse selection. First, annuitants as a group are longer-lived than randomly selected individuals in the population at large. The expected present value of the annuity payout stream from a typical voluntary annuity is thirteen percent higher for a typical 65-year-old male voluntary annuitant than for a typical 65-year-old male in the U.K. population. This is simply the result of differential mortality between the annuitant population and the population at large. Selection effects are more pronounced in the voluntary than in the compulsory annuity market, but even compulsory annuitants are not a random sample from the U.K. population. In the compulsory annuity market, the cost of adverse selection is between one third and one half of that in the voluntary annuity market. Second, annuitants select across different types of annuity products with different payout profiles, even within the compulsory market. The expected present values of payouts from inflation-indexed annuities and from nominal escalating annuities are lower than those from nominal annuities. This is consistent with longer-lived individuals choosing annuity products with greater payouts in the distant future. We find some puzzling evidence, however, in the relative pricing of nominal escalating annuities and inflation-indexed annuities. In addition to providing evidence on adverse selection, the U.K. annuity market can also be used to study how the price of an insurance product is related to the quantity of insurance purchased. Prices per annuity unit are lower for larger annuity policies than for smaller policies. Some theoretical models of insurance demand, which suggest that poorer risks should purchase more insurance and do not consider the fixed costs of issuing annuity or insurance policies, are inconsistent with this result.

Testing for Asymmetric Information Using 'Unused Observables' in Insurance Markets: Evidence from the U.K. Annuity Market

This paper tests for asymmetric information in the U.K. annuity market of the 1990s by trying to identify 'unused observables,' attributes of individual insurance buyers that are correlated both with subsequent claims experience and with insurance demand but that insurance companies did not use to set insurance prices. Unlike the widely-used positive correlation test for asymmetric information, which searches for a positive correlation between insurance demand and risk experience, the unused observables test is not confounded by heterogeneity in individual preference parameters that may affect insurance demand. We identify residential location as an unused observable in the U.K. annuity market of this period, and show that this variable was correlated both with annuity demand and with prospective mortality. Thus even though residential location was observed by all market participants, the decision not to condition prices on it created the same types of market inefficiencies that arise when annuity buyers have private information about mortality risk. Our findings raise interesting questions about how insurance companies select the set of buyer attributes that they use in setting policy prices. In the decade following the period that we study, U.K. insurance companies changed their pricing practices and began to condition annuity prices on a buyer's postcode.

The Size of the Illinois Human Service Workforce

Human services cover a broad range of programs, services, and facilities provided to the public that are designed to enhance the quality of life and well-being of people and communities. In most cases, human services are provided by agencies at the community level and include programs and services such as affordable housing, child care, mental health and substance use treatment, and job training, as well as those targeting specific populations such as immigrants, seniors, or people experiencing homelessness.This paper outlines an approach to estimating the size of the human service workforce in Illinois. Quantifying the size of Illinois' human service workforce fills a knowledge gap; with such diversity among human service organizations, a total figure for the entire sector has not before been estimated. An estimate of workers employed in human service organizations gives a sense of how much of the workforce is dependent on human service jobs. Additionally, it gives context and illustrates the relative size of this portion of the workforce to examine cross state comparisons in terms of the number of human service workers to residents in each state

The Financial Conditions of Illinois Human Service Nonprofits

This document examines the financial conditions of Illinois human service nonprofit organizations. The first section examines median and aggregate data of all nonprofits and the second section examines the financial conditions of the various nonprofit sectors, including Mental Health and Crisis Intervention; Crime and Legal-Related; Employment; Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition; Housing and Shelter; Youth Development; and Other Human Services

Redistribution by Insurance Market Regulation: Analyzing a Ban on Gender-Based Retirement Annuities

This paper shows how models of insurance markets with asymmetric information can be calibrated and solved to yield quantitative estimates of the consequences of government regulation. We estimate the impact of restricting gender-based pricing in the United Kingdom retirement annuity market, a market in which individuals are required to annuitize tax-preferred retirement savings but are allowed considerable choice over the annuity contract they purchase. After calibrating a lifecycle utility model and estimating a model of annuitant mortality that allows for unobserved heterogeneity, we solve for the range of equilibrium contract structures with and without gender-based pricing. Eliminating gender-based pricing is generally thought to redistribute resources from men to women, since women have longer life expectancies. We find that allowing insurers to offer a menu of contracts may reduce the amount of redistribution from men to women associated with gender-blind pricing requirements to half the level that would occur if insurers were required to sell a single pre-specified policy. The latter "one policy" scenario corresponds loosely to settings in which governments provide compulsory annuities as part of their Social Security program. Our findings suggest that recognizing the endogenous structure of insurance contracts is important for analyzing the economic effects of insurance market regulations. More generally, our results suggest that theoretical models of insurance market equilibrium can be used for quantitative policy analysis, not simply to derive qualitative findings.

School Climate Development Survey

Over the last twenty-five years the Consortium on Chicago School Research has engaged in systematic study of more than 400 Chicago Public Schools to determine organizational traits that are related to improvement in student learning. This effort was designed to help explain widely divergent levels of student success between very similar schools in the Chicago system. Initial discussions with educators at all levels, reviews of previous research, pilot studies, and field studies led to the identification of five school contextual factors – the 5Essential Supports – determined to be critical to school success: (1) effective leaders, (2) collaborative teachers, (3) involved families, (4) supportive environment, and (5) ambitious instruction. The framework of the 5Essential Supports served as a theoretical basis for a survey effort designed to measures and report on facets of school culture that could then be used by school leaders and practitioners to guide school improvement efforts. Research related to the 5Essential Supports consistently demonstrates a strong relationship between the presence of these supports and gains in student achievement. Led by Dr. James McMillan and Dr. Charol Shakeshaft from VCU’s School of Education, the purpose of this MERC study was (1) to develop a shortened version of the 5Essentials staff climate survey for the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium schools, (2) to pilot test the new survey with teachers and administrators, and (3) to determine effective methods of dissemination to support schools use f the survey data for school improvement purposes. The piloting and validation phase of the study demonstrated that the core constructs underlying the 5Essentials maintained high levels of validity and reliability in the shortened version. MERC also piloted and received feedback from school leaders on formats for reporting school climate results

What Lies Beneath: Treatment of Canvas-backed Pennsylvania Coal Mining Maps for Digitization

An ongoing program to preserve approximately seven hundred oversized, canvas-backed, coal mining maps from the CONSOL Energy Mining Map Collection was initiated by the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) in 2007, supported by funding from the United States Department of the Interior Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation (OSM) and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA-DEP). The main goal of this project is to stabilize and clean the mining maps for digitization at the OSM National Mine Map Repository (NMMR) located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The digitized data of the underground mines will be incorporated into Geographical Information Systems relative to mine safety, land reclamation, current mining operations, and new development