Targeting Chronically Homeless Veterans with HUD-VASH

Hundreds of veterans are sleeping on the street or in the emergency shelter system in the District of Columbia. This brief examines data from the vulnerability index survey, completed by the DC Department of Health and Human Services and Common Ground, a nonprofit supportive housing provider. These data indicate that homeless veterans in DC have numerous health problems, leaving them highly vulnerable to premature mortality. The DC Veteran Affairs Medical Center should prioritize these highly vulnerable homeless veterans for HUD-VASH vouchers, which link housing subsidies with supportive service

Homelessness Counts

A movement to end homelessness is underway. Thousands of stakeholders -- policymakers, advocates, researchers, practitioners, former and current homeless people, community leaders, and concerned citizens -- from across the country are involved in efforts to end homelessness at the local and national level. Today, hundreds of communities are re-tooling their homeless assistance systems and have committed to ending homelessness through local plans. At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) homelessness assistance programs are targeting resources to permanent housing, and the Congress and the Bush Administration have committed to ending chronic homelessness by developing 150,000 units of permanent supportive housing for people who have been homeless for long periods. The private sector, through major philanthropic organizations, is engaging and funding efforts that focus on permanent solutions for homeless people. And new research and imaginative policies at the state and local level are paving the way. Taken together, these efforts represent a nationwide effort to end homelessness. How will we know if these efforts are successful? This report lays the groundwork for measuring efforts to end homelessness by establishing a baseline number of homeless people from which to monitor trends in homelessness. We use local point-in-time counts of homeless people to create an estimate of the number of homeless people nationwide. As with all data, the counts included in this report are not perfect and have numerous limitations, but they are the best data available at this time. In January 2005, an estimated 744,313 people experienced homelessness. 56 percent of homeless people counted were living in shelters and transitional housing and, shockingly, 44 percent were unsheltered. 59 percent of homeless people counted were single adults and 41 percent were persons living in families. In total, 98,452 homeless families were counted. 23 percent of homeless people were reported as chronically homeless, which, according to HUD's definition, means that they are homeless for long periods or repeatedly and have a disability. A number of states had high rates of homelessness, including Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington State. In addition, Washington, DC had a high rate of homeless people. These statistics show that far too many people are homeless. There is, however, reason for optimism. During the past five years, community approaches to homelessness have changed and thousands of people are working toward the shared goal of ending homelessness. Measuring their success or failure will depend on collecting and analyzing outcome data, monitoring changes in homelessness populations, and understanding which interventions lead to different outcomes. Yet, up until now, we had no recent data on how many people are homeless in the United States. The data in this report represent the first effort to count homeless people nationwide in 10 years. We hope to make this report an annual report, tracking progress on the efforts to end homelessness nationwide. It is our belief that what gets measured, gets done

Residential Instability and the McKinney-Vento Homeless Children and Education Program: What We Know, Plus Gaps in Research

Reviews the literature on the effects of homelessness and residential instability on academic performance and describes the program designed to mitigate them. Calls for better data collection on the affected children's outcomes and the program's impact

Vital Mission: Ending Homelessness Among Veterans

Far too many veterans are homeless in America. Homeless veterans can be found in every state across the country and live in rural, suburban, and urban communities. Many have lived on the streets for years, while others live on the edge of homelessness, struggling to pay their rent. We analyzed data from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Census Bureau to examine homelessness and severe housing cost burden among veterans. This report includes the following findings: In 2006, approximately 195,827 veterans were homeless on a given night -- an increase of 0.8 percent from 194,254 in 2005. More veterans experience homeless over the course of the year. We estimate that 336,627 were homeless in 2006. Veterans make up a disproportionate share of homeless people. They represent roughly 26 percent of homeless people, but only 11 percent of the civilian population 18 years and older. This is true despite the fact that veterans are better educated, more likely to be employed, and have a lower poverty rate than the general population. A number of states, including Louisiana and California, had high rates of homeless veterans. In addition, the District of Columbia had a high rate of homelessness among veterans with approximately 7.5 percent of veterans experiencing homelessness. We estimate that in 2005 approximately 44,000 to 64,000 veterans were chronically homeless (i.e., homeless for long periods or repeatedly and with a disability). Lack of affordable housing is the primary driver of homelessness. The 23.4 million U.S. veterans generally do not have trouble affording housing costs; veterans have high rates of home ownership and appear generally well housed. However, there is a subset of veterans who have severe housing cost burden. We estimate that nearly half a million (467,877) veterans were severely rent burdened and were paying more than 50 percent of their income for rent. More than half (55 percent) of veterans with severe housing cost burden fell below the poverty level and 43 percent were receiving foods stamps. Rhode Island, California, Nevada, and Hawaii were the states with the highest percentage of veterans with severe housing cost burden. The District of Columbia had the highest rate, with 6.4 percent of veterans paying more than 50 percent of their income toward rent. Female veterans, those with a disability, and unmarried or separated veterans were more likely to experience severe housing cost burden. There are also differences by period of service, with those serving during the Korean War and WWII more likely to have severe housing cost burden. We estimate that approximately 89,553 to 467,877 veterans were at risk of homelessness. At risk is defined as being below the poverty level and paying more than 50 percent of household income on rent. It also includes households with a member who has a disability, a person living alone, and those who are not in the labor force. These findings highlight the need to expand homeless prevention and affordable housing programs targeted at veterans. Further the findings demonstrate that ending homelessness among veterans is a vital mission that requires the immediate attention of policymakers

The Role of Sexual Difference in Plato\u27s Timaeus

My dissertation is a reading of Plato’s Timaeus that centers sexual difference and in particular femininity. I analyze the role of sexual difference in the framing of the dialogue as well as its accounts of body in the first and second discourse and its account of health in the third discourse. I argue that sexual difference, and, in particular, sexual reproduction, serves as a guiding paradigm of Timaeus’ entire project. I argue in each part of my dissertation that various aspects of the Timaeus depend on a certain notion of sexual difference—even aspects which are seemingly causally prior to the issue of sexual difference (e.g., the nature of cause itself, structure). The dissertation consists of three parts. In the first part of my dissertation, I give a new reading of the myth of the origin of women at the end of the Timaeus and bring it into conversation with the dialogue’s opening in order to give an interpretation of the dialogue’s framing. I analyze the concept of sexual difference presented in this myth and argue that its philosophical richness has been overlooked, with many considering it to be either a joke or a sexist account. Focusing on Timaeus’s account of the woman’s relationship with her womb, I argue that womanhood in this myth is constituted by features that are elsewhere characterized as essentially philosophical (e.g., collaboration, making room, recognizing the complex structure of things, and nurture). In the second part of my dissertation, I introduce the two paradigms for the origin and composition of the cosmos in the Timaeus: the first discourse’s craft paradigm that construes the cosmos as a crafted artifact, and the second discourse’s genetic paradigm that construes the cosmos as a birthed organism. I am especially concerned with each discourse’s account of body. Here, I argue that the second discourse’s genetic paradigm is a significant revision of the first discourse’s craft paradigm. While some scholars have found that Timaeus’s insights in the second discourse are a further development of the groundwork he lays in the first discourse, I argue that the genetic paradigm’s focus on femininity and the mutual collaboration of masculine and feminine capacities is incompatible with the craft paradigm’s androcentrism. Finally, in the third part of my dissertation, I analyze the way that the Timaeus centers women’s bodies in its account of health in body and soul. Here, I argue that the Timaeus characterizes health by drawing on ideas about women’s bodies that are framed as symptoms of feminine disease in the Hippocratic texts (e.g., disequilibrium, flux, and porosity). Taken together, the three articles of my dissertation constitute a reading of the role of sexual difference in each part of the Timaeus

Development of inter-group tolerance through junior high school procedures

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University, 1936. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

The Influence of Cultural Schema on L2 Production: Analysis of Native Russian Speakers' English Personal Narratives

The present study focuses on 24 personal narratives told by eight highly proficient bilingual L1-Russian, L2-English speakers (NRS) in comparison to 24 personal narratives told by eight native English speakers (NES) in an effort to not only discover any structural differences that may be revealed through statistical analysis, but also to discover evidence of previously documented Russian and American cultural schema in the narratives through qualitative inquiry and narrative analysis. Although much has been written concerning Russian culture, cross-linguistic differences between Russian and English, and Russian English language learners these concepts have never been synthesized and applied to a study of Russian-English bilingual narratives in English in order to discover if the cultural schema and linguistic tendencies from L1 are maintained in the second language. The statistical structural analysis included in this study did not reveal any differences between the NES and NRS narratives. On the other hand qualitative analysis of cultural schemas revealed significant transfer of Russian cultural schema in the Native Russian Speaker participants' L2 narrative production. The Russian speakers were found to maintain their distinctly Russian emotional expression. Influence of cultural schema on L2 production was also visible in the thematic differences between the two sets of stories. The NES responses to each prompt were thematically quite similar, and differed noticeably from the themes of the NRS stories. Similarly, Hofstede's dimensions of national culture also revealed some differences between the two groups. However, theRussian cultural schema proposed by Croft, triplicity, was not found to be moreprominent in the NRS narratives than in the NES ones. In conclusion, the Native Russian Speakers in this study showed significant transfer of their L1 cultural schema when speaking their L2. The findings of this study have revealed the high likelihood of influence and transfer of cultural schema, even when bilingual English language speakers have achieved a very high level of English language mastery. However, this cultural influence on L2 production does not impinge on competence of bilingual speakers when speaking English

Housing as a Platform for Improving Education Outcomes Among Low-Income Children

Reviews research on how housing stability, affordability, quality, and location affect low-income children's safety, physical and mental health, and frequency of school changes, which in turn affect attendance, behavior, test scores, and graduation rates

Taxonomic Classification of IoT Smart Home Voice Control

Voice control in the smart home is commonplace, enabling the convenient control of smart home Internet of Things hubs, gateways and devices, along with information seeking dialogues. Cloud-based voice assistants are used to facilitate the interaction, yet privacy concerns surround the cloud analysis of data. To what extent can voice control be performed using purely local computation, to ensure user data remains private? In this paper we present a taxonomy of the voice control technologies present in commercial smart home systems. We first review literature on the topic, and summarise relevant work categorising IoT devices and voice control in the home. The taxonomic classification of these entities is then presented, and we analyse our findings. Following on, we turn to academic efforts in implementing and evaluating voice-controlled smart home set-ups, and we then discuss open-source libraries and devices that are applicable to the design of a privacy-preserving voice assistant for smart homes and the IoT. Towards the end, we consider additional technologies and methods that could support a cloud-free voice assistant, and conclude the work

Teacher Immediacy Behavior: Students Learning Outcomes and Evaluation

Is the teaching profession under siege? Are not the evaluators, funders, and beneficiaries of higher education continuing to shake their fingers at the teachers as the primary cause of dropping student performance? What, specifically, can be done in the classroom environment to address and respond to this criticism? The answer to this last question may be enhanced teacher immediacy