Central Policies for Local Debt: The Case of Teacher Pensions

The recent debt crises in New York City and Cleveland, the deterioration of public infra-structures in certain of our states and larger cities, and the occasional bankruptcy of smaller pension plans suggest that not all of local finance stands on a sound fiscal base. This paper examines the trends in funding for one form of state and local government debt--teacher pensions underfundings -- and asks what a central government might do to check any unwanted growth in these liabilities. The analysis concludes (i) that this form of state-local debt is sizeable and growing, (ii) that state and local governments have an implicit pay-as-you-go bias in pension financing which encourages the growth of debt, but (iii) central government benefit and funding regulations or debt relief policies can slow, or even reverse, that growth.

The Perpetual Challenge: Finding a Complementary Balance of Depth and Breadth in an Engineering Curriculum - Approach of the Electrical Engineering Faculty

The faculty of the School of Engineering conducted a thorough review of its ABET-accredited undergraduate degree programs to assess and evaluate possible changes to our curricula, both School-wide and ones specific to our programs.The aim of the intensive year-long study was to maintain the principal strengths of depth, yet allow more opportunities for students to gain additional breadth in preparation for success in a wide range of professional careers during the increasingly global nature of engineering in the 21st century. An engineering educators, we are certainly aware that finding such an appropriate balance between depth and breadth of education, especially one with complementary aspects, is an ongoing challenge.The balance point is not stagnant, but varies from time-to-time and place-to-place depending on societal needs and technological developments. The focus of this paper is to summarize our curricular changes, with their rationale, beginning with the ones that apply to all of our School\u27s curricula.The major changes include reinstituting a common first-year study to aid students in selecting a major, enhancing the capstone design sequence to encourage and facilitate more multidisciplinary projects, and designating nine semester hours of existing credits as professional electives that can be, for example, in engineering, business, or foreign languages.The specifics of these curricular changes as adopted and adapted for our Electrical Engineering program are highlighted in this paper

Use of an Analogy to Demonstrate the Origin and Nature of Steady-State Errors in Control Systems

An introductory control systems course can be challenging to undergraduate students due to its fairly sophisticated mathematical nature. For example, it can be difficult to comprehend how even a system composed of perfect components could have a steady-state error. To help students understand such non-intuitive concepts, it is beneficial to offer them a visual example that involves a familiar scenario. This paper describes a car race analogy which leverages these twocomplementary techniques in a one semester course for juniors and seniors in automatic control systems. The analogy consists of two competing cars of differing masses and air drags with various inputs via the gas pedal. Equations of motion are presented for the displacement, velocity, and acceleration for step, ramp, and parabolic inputs. MATLAB® software is used to solve the equations and plot the results for analysis and comparison. This familiar illustrative scenario allows students to discover easily and quickly how steady-state differences (analogous to errors) depend on the nature of the system and its type of input. It also demonstrates the effects of some easily understood corrective actions to reduce or eliminate the differences and reinforces understanding of the derivative-integral relationships between the displacement, velocity, and acceleration responses. The graphical nature of this illustration fits well with the visual learning style of many students. Through this multi-faceted investigative analogy, they gain an intuitive understanding of steady-state errors as a complement to the traditional mathematical treatment. Results of avoluntary survey completed by the students indicated that they found the car race analogy helpful in understanding the origin and nature of steady-state errors in control systems

Engineering Economics as a Benchmark Course in the Context of a Sustainable Continuous Improvement Process

Programs seeking ABET accreditation must demonstrate that they satisfy eight general accreditation criteria, plus any program specific criteria.The two most important and widely debated ABET accreditation criteria are Student Outcomes (SOs), and Continuous Improvement (CI). While ABET has always encouraged program improvement as part of the accreditation process, Continuous Improvement (CI) has emerged as the most important criterion for accreditation.The primary inputs to this criterion are the results of assessment and evaluation of SOs. And, course-embedded assessment plays a major role in the assessment of Student Outcomes.The outcomes of the CI process are the changes that improve an engineering program. Since 2006, we have been periodically reviewing our assessment and evaluation processes with a goal to reduce the amount of time faculty spend in gathering and analyzing data. The outcome of this effort is a more sustainable CI process; a process in which not all courses are involved in course-embedded assessment and not all student outcomes are assessed and evaluated every year. The choice of courses for course-embedded assessment is guided by two principles:(1) each Student Outcome is assessed with student work in a benchmark course, and (2) only required courses, not elective courses, in the curriculum are selected as benchmark courses. Assessment of a benchmark course is conducted with the following in mind:(1) assessment of student work measures the extent to which SOs are being attained, (2) it is not necessary to use all of the student work to assess an outcome, and (3) outcomes assessment is based upon student work and is guided by the grading of that work. The implementation of our course-embedded assessment method to a benchmark course, namely Engineering Economics, is presented in this paper. A description of the process, data collection efforts, and analysis of the results in applying course embedded assessment method to the benchmark course are presented in this article

The Patient‐Centered Medical Home and Patient Experience

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94450/1/hesr1429-sup-0001-Authormatrix.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94450/2/hesr1429.pd

Social Support Mediates the Relationship Between Mental-Physical Multiple Morbidities and Engagement in Aerobic Physical Activity Among Military Service Members and Veterans

Some research shows that physical activity levels are low among veterans, but research gaps exist specifically in regards to promoting physical activity in veterans with multiple morbidities. For the present study, we retrieved data from the 2015 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. The study sample included 57,842 military service members and veterans. We carried out a mediation analysis to determine the effect of social support on the relationship between multiple morbidities and aerobic physical activity. Social support partially mediated the relationship between the presence of multiple morbidities and aerobic physical activity, a*b= -0.003, [95% CI = -0.007, -0.001]. Programs aimed at facilitating adequate social support among service members and veterans with multiple morbidities may increase their uptake of aerobic physical activity, and thus, decrease concomitant risk for health-related disorders. </p

Pathways to Coastal Resiliency: The Adaptive Gradients Framework

Current and future climate-related coastal impacts such as catastrophic and repetitive flooding, hurricane intensity, and sea level rise necessitate a new approach to developing and managing coastal infrastructure. Traditional “hard” or “grey” engineering solutions are proving both expensive and inflexible in the face of a rapidly changing coastal environment. Hybrid solutions that incorporate natural, nature-based, structural, and non-structural features may better achieve a broad set of goals such as ecological enhancement, long-term adaptation, and social benefits, but broad consideration and uptake of these approaches has been slow. One barrier to the widespread implementation of hybrid solutions is the lack of a relatively quick but holistic evaluation framework that places these broader environmental and societal goals on equal footing with the more traditional goal of exposure reduction. To respond to this need, the Adaptive Gradients Framework was developed and pilot-tested as a qualitative, flexible, and collaborative process guide for organizations to understand, evaluate, and potentially select more diverse kinds of infrastructural responses. These responses would ideally include natural, nature-based, and regulatory/cultural approaches, as well as hybrid designs combining multiple approaches. It enables rapid expert review of project designs based on eight metrics called “gradients”, which include exposure reduction, cost efficiency, institutional capacity, ecological enhancement, adaptation over time, greenhouse gas reduction, participatory process, and social benefits. The framework was conceptualized and developed in three phases: relevant factors and barriers were collected from practitioners and experts by survey; these factors were ranked by importance and used to develop the initial framework; several case studies were iteratively evaluated using this technique; and the framework was finalized for implementation. The article presents the framework and a pilot test of its application, along with resources that would enable wider application of the framework by practitioners and theorists