Guides for the Journey: Supporting High-Risk Youth with Paid Mentors and Counselors

Strategies to concentrate resources on high-risk youth have long been a goal in the youth field, but the practical means of doing so frequently have eluded practitioners. High-risk youth often are highly transient, and they may need sustained, costly services to address their needs effectively. Guides for the Journey explores a concrete, flexible approach to the problem: the use of paid counselors who stay with young people for extended periods of time. The report profiles three programs now using this strategy and discusses how public funding to support wider use of paid mentors and counselors may be mobilized

The Least of These: Amachi and the Children of Prisoners

There is no rule book for creating, implementing and sustaining a successful social intervention. Hundreds, if not thousands, of now-defunct social programs attest to this reality. These programs may have succeeded in identifying a social need, a cogent and sometimes creative way of meeting that need, and some capacity (both financial and operational) to launch the effort.These are necessary elements -- but not sufficient ones. The social policy field does not consistently recognize or reward good ideas. Success is often as much a product of unusual circumstances -- confluence of the right time, the right idea and the right people -- as it is a result of inherent program quality and effectiveness.The Amachi program is a prime illustration of the unpredictable nature of success in the social policy arena. Its success resulted from a nearly unique blend of factors -- Public/Private Ventures (P/PV), which had been studying the issue of relationships as a way of helping young people for almost two decades; the Pew Charitable Trusts' interest in the potential of faith-based organizations to meet social needs; the well-known academic John DiIulio, who was looking for practical ways to put Pew's interest into action; a source of stabilizing program knowledge (Big Brothers Big Sisters of America); and finally a leader, W. Wilson Goode, Sr., whose combination of personal contacts, managerial knowledge and experience, and dedication to the idea of Amachi was decisive in making the program a success locally, and later nationally.Politics also played a role: the election of a president (in 2000) interested in faith-based initiatives; DiIulio's role in steering the president's attention to Amachi during its early days in Philadelphia; and the way that attention led to a sustained national focus (with federal program funding) on the target group Amachi was designed to serve: children of prisoners. The interplay of these factors -- along with good luck and good timing -- is in many ways the core of the Amachi story, which is detailed in the pages that follow

Taking Stock: A Review of U.S. Youth Employment Policy and Prospects

This paper reviews which young adults are most likely to have major problems connecting with the labor force and proposes a series of programs and policies to respond to this population's needs. Specifically, the author asks: How do we define the youth employment problem? What is the history of policy efforts responding to the problem, and how successful have these efforts been? What do history and experience suggest as the most appropriate and feasible policies to pursue

Living Originalism

Originalists routinely argue that originalism is the only coherent and legitimate theory of constitutional interpretation. This Article endeavors to undermine those claims by demonstrating that, despite the suggestion of originalist rhetoric, originalism is not a single, coherent, unified theory of constitutional interpretation, but is rather a disparate collection of distinct constitutional theories that share little more than a misleading reliance on a common label. Originalists generally agree only on certain very broad precepts that serve as the fundamental underlying principles of constitutional interpretation: specifically, that the writtenness of the Constitution necessitates a fixed constitutional meaning, and that courts that see themselves as empowered to give the Constitution some avowedly different meaning are behaving contrary to law. Originalists have been able to achieve agreement on these broad underlying principles, but they have often viewed as unduly narrow and mistaken the understanding held by the original originalists-the framers of originalism, if you will-as to how those principles must be put into action. And originalists disagree so profoundly amongst themselves about how to effectuate those underlying principles that over time they have articulated-and continue to articulate-a wide array of strikingly disparate, and mutually exclusive, constitutional theories. In this regard, originalists have followed a living, evolving approach to constitutional interpretation. Our account of originalism\u27s evolution-and of the extensive disagreement among originalists today-undermines originalists\u27 normative claims about the superiority of their approach. Originalists\u27 claims about the unique and exclusive legitimacy of their theory-that originalism self-evidently represents the correct method of constitutional interpretation-founder when one considers that originalists themselves cannot even begin to agree on what their correct approach actually entails. And their claims that originalism has a unique ability to produce determinate and fixed constitutional meaning, and thus that only originalism properly treats the Constitution as law and properly constrains judges from reading their own values into the Constitution, stumble when one considers the rapid evolution and dizzying array of versions of originalism; because each version has the potential to produce a different constitutional meaning, the constitutional meaning that a committed originalist judge would find turns out to be anything but fixed. As originalism evolves, the constitutional meanings that it produces evolve along with it. Today\u27s originalists not only reach results markedly different from those originalists reached thirty years ago, but also produce widely divergent results amongst themselves. Judges committed to the originalist enterprise thus have significant discretion to choose (consciously or subconsciously) the version of originalism that is most likely to dictate results consistent with their own preferences. As such, originalism suffers from the very flaws that its proponents have identified in its alternatives

The Use of Wheel Brakes on Airplanes

The results of tests to determine the effect of wheel brakes on the landing run of an airplane under conditions of load and at various wind velocities are presented

Mechanical properties of wool and cotton yarns used in twenty-first century tapestry: preparing for the future by understanding the present

The conservation of historic tapestries is a complex and highly skilled task. Tapestries now being woven will need conservation in years to come. Can we, by understanding the properties of these contemporary works, assist the conservators of the future? The recreation of the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries being undertaken by the West Dean Tapestry Studio offers a unique opportunity to access the materials being used and to create a body of data on their initial properties. This study uses tensile testing of the warp and weft materials to determine their maximum load at break, extension at maximum load, and specific stress (tenacity). Wool weft yarns from two different sources and of two thicknesses were examined. These wools were dyed ‘in house’ and the effect of the different dyes used was also assessed. These parameters all showed some significant (P < 0.05) differences. Cotton warp yarns of differing thickness and a gold thread were also tested. The comparison of how cotton and wool break demonstrates that when a tapestry is put under sufficient stress the cotton will snap but the wool may only stretch. However, this could often be beyond its recovery range resulting in a failure to return to shape

Role of the community matron in advance care planning and ‘do not attempt CPR’ decision-making: a qualitative study

The community matron (CM) is often the key worker caring for patients with chronic, life-limiting, long-term conditions, but these patients are not always recognised as palliative cases. This study explored the experiences of CMs with regard to advance care planning (ACP) and ‘do not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation’ (DNACPR) decision-making to understand whether or not they felt adequately prepared for this aspect of their role, and why. Qualitative data were generated from six CMs using a broad interpretive phenomenological approach. Face-to-face recorded interviews were analysed using template analysis. The study found that although participants faced complex ethical situations around ACP and DNACPR almost on a daily basis, none had received any formal training despite the emphasis on training in national and local guidelines. Participants often struggled to get their patients accepted on to the Gold Standards Framework. The research found variability and complexity of cases to be the main barriers to clear identification of the palliative phase

Real-world Quantum Sensors: Evaluating Resources for Precision Measurement

Quantum physics holds the promise of enabling certain tasks with better performance than possible when only classical resources are employed. The quantum phenomena present in many experiments signify nonclassical behavior, but do not always imply superior performance. Quantifying the enhancement achieved from quantum behavior requires careful analysis of the resources involved. We analyze the specific case of parameter estimation using an optical interferometer, where increased precision can be achieved using quantum probe states. Common performance measures are examined and it is shown that some overestimate the improvement. For the simplest experimental case we compare the different measures and show this overestimate explicitly. We give the preferred analysis of real-world experiments and calculate benchmark values for experimental parameters necessary to realize a precision enhancement.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

The Effect of Varied Gender Groupings on Argumentation Skills among Middle School Students in Different Cultures

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore the effect of varied gender groupings on argumentation skills among middle school students in Taiwan and the United States in a project-based learning environment that incorporated a graph-oriented computer-assisted application (GOCAA). A total of 43 students comprised the treatment condition and were engaged in the collaborative argumentation process in same-gender groupings. Of these 43 students, 20 were located in the U.S. and 23 were located in Taiwan. A total of 40 students comprised the control condition and were engaged in the collaborative argumentation process in mixed-gender groupings. Of these 40 students, 19 were in the U.S. and 21 were in Taiwan. In each country, verbal collaborative argumentation was recorded and the students’ post essays were collected. Among females in Taiwan, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated that statistically a significant gender-grouping effect was evident on the total argumentation skills outcome, while MANOVA indicated no significant gender-grouping effect on the combined set of skill outcomes. Among females in the U.S., MANOVA indicated statistically significant gender-grouping effect on the combined set of argumentation skills outcomes Specifically, U.S. female students in mixed-gender groupings (the control condition) significantly outperformed female students in single-gender groupings (the treatment condition) in the counterargument and rebuttal skills. No significant group differences were observed among males. A qualitative analysis was conducted to examine how the graph-oriented computer-assisted application supported students’ development of argumentation skills in different gender groupings in both countries. In each country, all teams in both conditions demonstrated a similar pattern of collaborative argumentation with the exception of three female teams in the U.S. Female teams, male teams, (the treatment condition) and mixed-gender teams (the control condition) demonstrated metacognition regulation skills in different degrees and with different scaffolding