This discussion marked the launch of MPI's Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy Initiative, which aims to generate a big-picture, evidence-driven vision of the role immigration should play in America’s future, as well as to build a bipartisan center so needed reforms can be enacted. The initiative's leader, MPI Senior Fellow Doris Meissner, joins in conversation with former Bush administration Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and former Obama White House Domestic Policy Council Director Cecilia Muñoz about the prospects for action and what's needed.

The recent rise in xenophobia in Hungary stands in marked contrast with the country's rich migration history. After 390,000 migrants and asylum seekers arrived in 2015, the government of Viktor Orbán issued policies to significantly limit migration and enacted a law criminalizing humanitarian assistance to migrants. This country profile examines Hungary’s migration past and present, tracing the country’s multicultural heritage to the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment.

Amid aging populations and the growth of chronic diseases, the demand for skilled health-care professionals is on the rise in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. This report explores the policy implications, benefits, and challenges of harmonizing nursing qualifications in the region, suggesting that a more collaborative approach could result in greater supply and quality of nurses.

As governments seek to push their borders out by amassing ever more data on travelers and migrants, their creation of increasingly complex border surveillance systems and use of risk-assessment technologies could ease mobility for some while rendering other groups immobile based on hypothetical risk profiles and decisions that are not publicly known and cannot be challenged, as this article explores.

Texas A&M College of Dentistry announced Jan. 17 it opened it’s a new 160,000-square-foot, nine-story clinic, which enables the dental school to increase underserved patients’ access to care.

This event marks the launch of a major new initiative—Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy—that aims to generate a big-picture, evidence-driven vision of the role immigration can and should play in America’s future in order to leverage a comparative advantage for the nation.

In many recent European and U.S. elections, candidates touting nativist populist and anti-immigrant platforms have enjoyed rising support. As populism moves from the fringes into the mainstream, this report takes stock of the economic and social forces driving its rise, the diverse ways populists are influencing immigration policymaking, and what it will take to build a new center around immigration and integration issues.

When Columbia University sociologist Peter Bearman dived into the world of the white-gloved workers who open the front doors of expensive New York apartment buildings, he found that most people who applied for jobs as doormen never got one. Most doormen, however, had not applied for their jobs.

Marking the release of an MPI Europe report commissioned as part of the EU-FRANK project, this webinar examines critical gaps in the research and evaluation of refugee resettlement programs and recommendations for improving evidence gathering and knowledge sharing between resettlement countries. 

Since the 2015–16 refugee crisis, European policymakers have eagerly sought cooperation with origin and transit countries in the hopes of stemming unauthorized migration to Europe. This approach is neither new, nor without its limitations. By examining the evolution of two longstanding Mediterranean partnerships—between Spain and Morocco, and Italy and Tunisia—this report offers insights on what has and has not worked.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. immigration system was dramatically reshaped by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which shone a harsh spotlight on weaknesses in visa and immigration screening processes. From the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to expanded national security protections in immigration and tourism policies, countless changes in the immigration arena have unfolded over the past 19 years.

Addressing the deep-rooted integration challenges unearthed by large-scale migration and rapid social change will require a combination of strategies. Governments in Europe and North America must create a new social contract for increasingly diverse societies that are confronting cycles of disruption. This report sketches a blueprint for an adaptive process oriented by skill needs rather than national origins.

This recipe features on Foodie Tuesday, a weekly segment on 774 Drive with Raf Epstein, 3.30PM, courtesy of Cassie Duncan from Sustainable Table.

This recipe features on Foodie Tuesday, a weekly segment on 774 Drive with Raf Epstein, 3.30PM, courtesy of Tony Twitchett, Taxi Kitchen

Ever since we launched our Free COVID-19 Alerting System, we’ve been continuously asked how we made it. In this blog…

Jane K. Dickinson
Jan 1, 2017; 35:51-54
Commentary

Research findings on the implementation of a new teacher candidate performance assessment in Massachusetts inform the development of additional supports for educator preparation programs.

"Teaching is a political act," argues teacher-turned-politician John Waldron. And it's going to take more organizing to rescue public education.

While most teachers have online access at home, internet service for many educators in rural areas is spotty, expensive, or nonexistent.

While most teachers have online access at home, internet service for many educators in rural areas is spotty, expensive, or nonexistent.

Frank DeAngelis, who was the principal of Columbine High School from 1996-2014, talks about the steps he took to heal students and staff in the wake of the school shooting.

While most teachers have online access at home, internet service for many educators in rural areas is spotty, expensive, or nonexistent.

Delaware is among three states using federal grants to develop school and district leaders who understand the complexities of special education.

"The HIV resilience framework will be of relevance to a wide range of people involved at all levels of the HIV response. We hope it provides encouragement for government decision makers and policy developers to pursue consistent and enabling policy and legislative environments and work cooperatively between jurisdictions and across departments to achieve best practice. Our consultation suggests that consistent legislation with the goal of supporting strong health outcomes, making disclosure safe, and eliminating stigmatising laws is crucial to creating environments in which people with HIV feel safe to access testing, treatment, and care. The HIV resilience framework also contains valuable insights for those who have responsibility for HIV health program management and service delivery, providing guidance to help ensure that programs, services, interventions or strategies supporting people living with HIV are developed and delivered in a way that is mindful of the interlinked twin goals of building personal resilience and eliminating stigma and discrimination." --President's message (page 6).

Caterpillars -- Australia, Southern -- Identification -- Pictorial works.

Indiana's efforts to give students more control over their academic transcripts may prove a boon for researchers and school reformers, too.

Berlin : Hirschwald, 1905.

Paris : Pihan Delaforest (Morinval), 1831.

Londres : Paris, 1860.

Paris : A. Delahaye, 1872.

Paris : Georges Carre, 1896.

Paris : Alcan, 1903.

Toulon : chez l'auteur, 1812.

Amstelodami : Typis A. Wolfgang, 1674.

[19--?]

[between 1700 and 1799]

A Paris (rue St Jacques au dessus de celle des Mathurins au Gd. St. Remy : ches Huquier fils, graveur, [between 1700 and 1799]

[London] (No 69 St Paul's Churchyard) : Printed for Carington Bowles ; [London] (opposite Fetter Lane, Fleet Street) : Robt. Sayer ; [London] (in Cornhil) : Robert Wilkinson, [between 1700 and 1799]

A Paris (rue St Jacques au dessus de celle des Mathurins au Gd. St. Remy) : ches Huquier fils, graveur, [between 1700 and 1799]

A Paris (rue St Jacques a l'Hotel Saumur) : chez Mondhare, [between 1760 and 1792]

The large volumes of Sentinel-1 data produced over Europe are being used to develop pan-national ground motion services. However, simple analysis techniques like thresholding cannot detect and classify complex deformation signals reliably making providing usable information to a broad range of non-expert stakeholders a challenge. Here we explore the applicability of deep learning approaches by adapting a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect deformation in a national-scale velocity field. For our proof-of-concept, we focus on the UK where previously identified deformation is associated with coal-mining, ground water withdrawal, landslides and tunnelling. The sparsity of measurement points and the presence of spike noise make this a challenging application for deep learning networks, which involve calculations of the spatial convolution between images. Moreover, insufficient ground truth data exists to construct a balanced training data set, and the deformation signals are slower and more localised than in previous applications. We propose three enhancement methods to tackle these problems: i) spatial interpolation with modified matrix completion, ii) a synthetic training dataset based on the characteristics of real UK velocity map, and iii) enhanced over-wrapping techniques. Using velocity maps spanning 2015-2019, our framework detects several areas of coal mining subsidence, uplift due to dewatering, slate quarries, landslides and tunnel engineering works. The results demonstrate the potential applicability of the proposed framework to the development of automated ground motion analysis systems.

Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said the company was aiming to resume production this month, despite the ongoing grounding and coronavirus pandemic.

Maxim Rabinovich, Aaditya Ramdas, Michael I. Jordan, Martin J. Wainwright.

Source: Bayesian Analysis, Volume 15, Number 2, 505--532.

Abstract:
Slow mixing is the central hurdle is applications of Markov chains, especially those used for Monte Carlo approximations (MCMC). In the setting of Bayesian inference, it is often only of interest to estimate the stationary expectations of a small set of functions, and so the usual definition of mixing based on total variation convergence may be too conservative. Accordingly, we introduce function-specific analogs of mixing times and spectral gaps, and use them to prove Hoeffding-like function-specific concentration inequalities. These results show that it is possible for empirical expectations of functions to concentrate long before the underlying chain has mixed in the classical sense, and we show that the concentration rates we achieve are optimal up to constants. We use our techniques to derive confidence intervals that are sharper than those implied by both classical Markov-chain Hoeffding bounds and Berry-Esseen-corrected central limit theorem (CLT) bounds. For applications that require testing, rather than point estimation, we show similar improvements over recent sequential testing results for MCMC. We conclude by applying our framework to real-data examples of MCMC, providing evidence that our theory is both accurate and relevant to practice.