An Assessment of Mental Health Services for Veterans in the State of Texas

This report describes the complex challenges faced by veterans and their families in seeking, navigating, and attaining adequate mental health care in Texas. There are 1.7 million veterans in Texas, comprising 8.6 percent of the adult population. According to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), the number of veterans requiring mental health services has grown dramatically and will continue to increase, making veterans’ mental health care an urgent issue in Texas. The federal agencies responsible for military and veterans mental health care, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the VA, have created new programs and invested significant financial and staff resources. Despite barriers to addressing veterans mental health needs. Texas state agencies have increased funding and instituted new mental health programs supporting returning veterans. Nonprofit agencies focused on veteran’s mental health have multiplied across Texas and the U.S. over the past decade to fill gaps in care. While these organizations provide a growing and increasingly diverse set of resources for veterans to extend the scope of support, volunteer efforts can suffer from fragmentation and overlap. The report identifies current practices, challenges, and opportunities within and across each group of service providers. The report draws on government reports, scholarly literature, and agency websites, as well as interviews with counselors, Veteran Service Officers, nonprofit providers, state officials, and veterans themselves. This report offers five recommendations toward the goal that veterans’ mental health care in Texas become comprehensive, inclusive, effective, and efficient. First, there is a need for greater inter-agency communication across organizations, improved outreach efforts, and increased services for hard-to-reach populations, such as homeless veterans. Second, federal agencies ought to address staff shortages, improve the transition from DoD to VA care, and increase feedback. Third, at the state level, specialized services are needed to address unique veterans’ needs concentrated in cities across Texas as well as those dispersed in rural areas. Fourth, providers can improve mental health care by integrating social services and law enforcement. Fifth, both veterans and providers can benefit if they recognize opportunities for cooperation and coordination and work towards long-term goals that emphasize outcomes that improve the lives of returning veterans. This research was funded in part by the Jack S. Blanton Research Fellowship and the George A. Roberts Research Fellowship of the IC² Institute.IC2 Institut

Information for Accountability: Transparency and Citizen Engagement for Improved Service Delivery in Education Systems

This paper explores what we know about the impact of information-based initiatives on increased engagement, accountability, or improved decision-making at the school-level, which could then lead to improved education quality and student learning. It summarizes and builds on recent large-scale conceptual frameworks and a growing evidence base of impact evaluations, and extracts lessons from case study research in Australia, Moldova, Pakistan, and the Philippines to provide nuanced insight into processes and mechanisms behind reform efforts. It also exploits findings from recent impact valuations after categorizing them according to the intensity of interventions and their target change agents -- parents, teachers, school principals, and local officials. The findings suggest that few initiatives have led to improved service delivery at the school level and evidence on enhanced learning outcomes is limited, in part because they are rarely tracked. While there is scope for improving such demand-side interventions, we conclude that systemic change will additionally require improved accountability mechanisms and greater use of relevant data and evidence internally within bureaucracies

Determinants of Phage Host Range in Staphylococcus Species.

Bacteria in the genus Staphylococcus are important targets for phage therapy due to their prevalence as pathogens and increasing antibiotic resistance. Here we review Staphylococcus outer surface features and specific phage resistance mechanisms that define host range - the set of strains an individual phage can potentially infect. Phage infection goes through five distinct phases - attachment, uptake, biosynthesis, assembly and lysis. Adsorption inhibition, encompassing outer surface teichoic acid receptor alteration, elimination, or occlusion, limits successful phage attachment and entry. Restriction-modification systems (in particular, type I and IV systems), which target phage DNA inside the cell, serve as the major barriers to biosynthesis as well as transduction and horizontal gene transfer between clonal complexes and species. Resistance to late stages of infection occurs through mechanisms such as assembly interference, in which staphylococcal pathogenicity islands siphon away superinfecting phage proteins to package their own DNA. While genes responsible for teichoic acid biosynthesis, capsule, and restriction-modification are found in most Staphylococcus strains, a variety of other host-range determinants (e.g., CRISPRs, abortive infection, and superinfection immunity) are sporadic. Fitness costs of phage resistance through teichoic acid structure alteration could make staphylococcal phage therapies promising, but host range prediction is complex because of the large number of genes involved, many with unknown roles. In addition, little is known about genetic determinants that contribute to host range expansion in the phages themselves. Future research must identify host range determinants, characterize resistance development during infection and treatment, and examine population-wide genetic background effects on resistance selection

Facies, outcrop gamma ray and isotopic signature of exposed Miocene subtropical continental shelf carbonates, North West Cape, Western Australia

Exposed, uplifted Miocene carbonate sequences of the Cape Range, North West Cape, Western Australia, provide outcrop analogues of seismic sequences from offshore parts of the shelf. Facies include deep shelf marls (very fine and fine packstone), larger foram wackestone, floatstone and muddy rudstone, foram-coralline algal skeletal fragment packstone wackestone (shallow seagrass facies), lagoonal wackestone mudstone with scattered corals, and tidal flat laminites. The exposed Early Miocene units include the Mandu highstand, a sequence in the Tulki and one in the Middle Miocene Trealla Limestone. Sequences contain decameter scale (5 20 m thick), 4th-order parasequences evident on gamma ray logs and by facies stacking, that shallow and coarsen up; they appear to be due to eccentricity driven sea-level changes which may have been up to 50 m. Higher frequency meter-scale parasequences of deep water marl up into larger foram rudstone/floatstone (perhaps precession/obliquity) are evident at the base of the exposed Mandu section. These parasequences are not merely random storm deposits. This is indicated by the covariance of C and O isotopes, with the lighter values associated with deepening and deposition of deep shelf marls, and the heavier values being associated with shallowing and deposition of larger foram facies.The uplifted Miocene continental shelf sediments of the North West Cape preserve a record of eustasy, paleoclimate and paleoceanography and thus provide a window into factors affecting the shelf, that can be compared with coeval, better studied deep sea cores

Privacy and Social Networking Sites

College students are increasingly sharing their lives online through social networking sites with little concern for who may be viewing their information. Understanding student use of social networking sites along with privacy rights online will help professionals in the development of appropriate online activity and policies

Framer: Planning Models from Natural Language Action Descriptions

In this paper, we describe an approach for learning planning domain models directly from natural language (NL) descriptions of activity sequences. The modelling problem has been identified as a bottleneck for the widespread exploitation of various technologies in Artificial Intelligence, including automated planners. There have been great advances in modelling assisting and model generation tools, including a wide range of domain model acquisition tools. However, for modelling tools, there is the underlying assumption that the user can formulate the problem using some formal language. And even in the case of the domain model acquisition tools, there is still a requirement to specify input plans in an easily machine readable format. Providing this type of input is impractical for many potential users. This motivates us to generate planning domain models directly from NL descriptions, as this would provide an important step in extending the widespread adoption of planning techniques. We start from NL descriptions of actions and use NL analysis to construct structured representations, from which we construct formal representations of the action sequences. The generated action sequences provide the necessary structured input for inducing a PDDL domain, using domain model acquisition technology. In order to capture a concise planning model, we use an estimate of functional similarity, so sentences that describe similar behaviours are represented by the same planning operator. We validate our approach with a user study, where participants are tasked with describing the activities occurring in several videos. Then our system is used to learn planning domain models using the participants' NL input. We demonstrate that our approach is effective at learning models on these tasks

Toward Data-Driven Education Systems: More Data and More Evidence Use

Governments and organizations have generated copious amounts of data and analysis to support education decision-making around the world. While continued investments in education data collection, curation and management are necessary, the ultimate value of evidence is not in its production, but its use. Information does not necessarily translate into better decisions because those who produce education data are often far removed from those who make crucial decisions about education policies, programs, and investments. With limited insight into what evidence decision-makers use and need, the likelihood of non-use and misuse of information is high. There has been surprisingly little systematic research on the types of information education decision-makers in developing countries value most – and why. This paper aims to help the global education community take stock of what information decision-makers use to manage change and measure results. It analyzes data from two surveys of education stakeholders in low- and middle-income countries on their use of data in decision-making

Visualization of Patient Behavior from Natural Language Recommendations

The visualization of procedural knowledge from textual documents using 3D animation may be a way to improve understanding. We are interested in applying this approach to documents relating to patient education for bariatric surgery: a domain with challenging textual documents describing behavior recommendations that contain few procedural steps and leave much commonsense knowledge unspecified. In this work we look at how to automatically capture knowledge from a range of differently phrased recommendations and use that with implicit knowledge about compliance and violation, such that the recommendations can be visualized using 3D animations. Our solution is an end-to-end system that automates this process via: analysis of input recommendations to uncover their conditional structure; the use of commonsense knowledge and deontic logic to generate compliance and violation rules; and mapping of this knowledge to update a default knowledge base, which is used to generate appropriate sequences of visualizations. In this paper we overview this approach and demonstrate its potential

The impact of remote and virtual laboratories in engineering education: a workshop

Current developments in information and communication technology (ICT) can be successfully embedded in the pedagogical design of engineering laboratories. This can open new horizons in the learning experience and widen participation. The development of virtual and remote laboratories are examples of embedding modern ICT in education which are becoming more and more widely accepted in engineering education. This workshop aims to corroborate the impact of virtual and remote laboratories on the development of knowledge and transferable skills in engineering students. The workshop will commence with introductions to the concepts of remote and virtual laboratories describing the pedagogical framework that supports the applications of these technologies to traditional and nontraditional student