Lessons Learned in Eurasia Ministry: Mostly the Hard Way

The present article is based on a speech delivered at a conference of the United Methodist Church: “Eurasia-Central Asia – In Mission Together,” Fulton, Maryland, May 5, 2017

A Promising Start: Year Up's Initial Impacts on Low-Income Young Adults' Careers

Year Up, a non-profit organization headquartered in Boston, was founded by a former software entrepreneur in 2000 to provide a year of training and work experience to urban young adults ages 18 to 24. It has been able to develop a network of program sites across the country without the constraints imposed by public funding. Initial results from a small-scale impact study conducted by Mobility demonstrate that Year Up students experience remarkable earnings gains after a year in the labor market, compared to a control group. These gains were achieved during one of the worst economic recessions in recent memory, a recession that hit young people particularly April 2011 A Promising Start Year Up's Initial Impacts on Low-Income Young Adults' Careers Anne Roder Mark Elliott economic mobility corporation 1 A Promising Start Year Up's Initial Impacts on Low-Income Young Adults' Careers hard. Also, the Year Up experience does not deter young people from pursuing further education—program participants are just as likely to enroll in postsecondary education as control group members

Increasing State Restrictions on Russian Protestant Seminaries

In sum, Russian Protestant seminaries are presently undergoing a trial by state inspection that threatens their very existence. Academics Perry Glanzer and Konstantin Petrenko are correct in asserting that the Russian state’s “power to license and accredit” is “the power of life and death” over any educational institution. State justifications for close oversight of Protestant seminaries appear overstated at best and lack credibility at worst. As regards state concerns for quality control, should not the Russian constitution’s requirement for separation of church and state take precedence over a secular government’s presumption to instruct believers on how best to train their clergy

What's Next After Work First: Workforce Development Report to the Field

Moving people into the workforce quickly may be the best first step to moving them out of poverty; but, by itself, rapid attachment is not likely to achieve the more important workforce development goals of enabling people to keep their jobs and leave poverty behind. This report explores the new challenges to building self-sufficiency brought about by the work first orientation of welfare reform, and the steps that practitioners, policymakers, and researchers may need to consider to keep their poverty alleviation strategies on track. The report includes descriptions of innovations in three key areas -- employer involvement, working with work first, and postemployment services -- which P/PV believes to be necessary to advance workforce development in the uncertain climate of welfare and education and training reform

Relationship between use of ankle-foot orthoses and quality of life and psychological well being : a research plan

An ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) is an externally applied device that encompasses the joints of the ankle and foot, used to modify the structural and functional characteristics of the neuromuscular and skeletal systems(ISO,1989,a&b). AFOs are prescribed for people who have a loss of function affecting their mobility, experienced in wide range of conditions such as stroke, poliomyelitis, cerebral palsy, spina bifida and osteoarthritis

Evaluating the Impact of SDC on the GMRES Iterative Solver

Increasing parallelism and transistor density, along with increasingly tighter energy and peak power constraints, may force exposure of occasionally incorrect computation or storage to application codes. Silent data corruption (SDC) will likely be infrequent, yet one SDC suffices to make numerical algorithms like iterative linear solvers cease progress towards the correct answer. Thus, we focus on resilience of the iterative linear solver GMRES to a single transient SDC. We derive inexpensive checks to detect the effects of an SDC in GMRES that work for a more general SDC model than presuming a bit flip. Our experiments show that when GMRES is used as the inner solver of an inner-outer iteration, it can "run through" SDC of almost any magnitude in the computationally intensive orthogonalization phase. That is, it gets the right answer using faulty data without any required roll back. Those SDCs which it cannot run through, get caught by our detection scheme

Through the Eye of a Needle: The Challenge of Providing Employment Services in New York's Chinatown Post September 11th

Prepared for the US Department of Labor, this P/PV report evaluates the effectiveness of the National Emergency Grant (NEG) money awarded to organizations in Chinatown in the wake of September 11th. Through interviews with program staff and key informants, P/PV examines the outcomes achieved by individual grantees, assesses the effect of the NEG on overall service provision and provides recommendations about how the Chinatown NEG could be adjusted to respond to similar situations in the future

Relative Strength

We heard a lot during the 2000 presidential campaign about the importance of working families. Each party has done its best to demonstrate that it will be the better friend to these households. Ironically, the nation's workforce development policies have not only not paid much attention to families, but they have made it considerably more difficult to implement family-oriented employment programs. Relative Strength attempts to shed some light on why developing such programs is so challenging, how some organizations have managed to do it, and how their experiences can inform the field. We do not expect, nor would we recommend, that the employment field abandon its focus on individuals in favor of families. But it does seem that there is a need and considerable interest in undertaking such efforts if more flexible workforce development policies can be developed