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Humans and robots will need to collaborate in order to create a sustainable human lunar presence by the end of the 2020s. This includes cases in which a human will be required to teleoperate an autonomous rover that has encountered an instrument assembly failure. To aid teleoperators in the troubleshooting process, we propose a virtual reality digital twin placed in a simulated environment. Here, the operator can virtually interact with a digital version of the rover and mechanical arm that uses the same controls and kinematic model. The user can also adopt the egocentric (a first person view through using stereoscopic passthrough) and exocentric (a third person view where the operator can virtually walk around the environment and rover as if they were on site) view. We also discuss our metrics for evaluating the differences between our digital and physical robot, as well as the experimental concept based on real and applicable missions, and future work that would compare our platform to traditional troubleshooting methods., Comment: 5 pages, 9 figures, submitted to: International Workshop on Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed-Reality for Human-Robot Interactions 2022

Several economic factors influence the availability of job openings and labor supply, including technological change and access to quality educational resources. One of the most important factors explaining the current disparity between available jobs and labor supply, however, has been the "skills gap," or the difference between the skills needed for occupations and the skills workers hold. To address the skills gap, economists and policymakers have proposed improving access to--and delivery of--job training and education. While workforce skills training is structured and delivered in different formats, it typically results in some type of credential to demonstrate completion and competency. Labor market data demonstrate that nondegree credentials--that is, certificates, licenses, or industry certifications other than an associate or bachelor's degree--add value to workers who hold them, providing them with greater earnings than those who do not possess such credentials. In some industries, the earnings premium for holding a credential is as high as the earnings premium for holding a college degree. These training programs are particularly useful because participating students are not tied to enrolling in credit-bearing programs, which usually have longer time requirements and course sequences and delay transition to the workforce. The longer time needed to complete a credit-bearing training program is particularly difficult for unemployed or low-wage workers who need enhanced earnings as quickly as possible. Nondegree credentials may be obtained through both postsecondary credit-bearing and noncredit education and training programs at a number of institutions. Given the increasing need to more effectively and quickly upskill workers for unfilled occupations, an emerging option is expanding noncredit skills training at community colleges. Community colleges are already at the forefront of noncredit skills training. The expansion of noncredit skills training at community colleges, and the factors influencing its efficacy and use, provides an important framework for policymakers to consider, especially in light of ongoing questions regarding college affordability and the return on investment of various postsecondary education alternatives.

In this work, BV RI light curves of 55 Type II supernovae (SNe II) from the Lick Observatory Supernova Search program obtained with the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope and the 1 m Nickel telescope from 2006 to 2018 are presented. Additionally, more than 150 spectra gathered with the 3 m Shane telescope are published. We conduct an analyse of the peak absolute magnitudes, decline rates, and time durations of different phases of the light and colour curves. Typically, our light curves are sampled with a median cadence of 5.5 days for a total of 5093 photometric points. In average V-band plateau declines with a rate of 1.29 mag (100 days)-1, which is consistent with previously published samples. For each band, the plateau slope correlates with the plateau length and the absolute peak magnitude: SNe II with steeper decline have shorter plateau duration and are brighter. A time-evolution analysis of spectral lines in term of velocities and pseudoequivalent widths is also presented in this paper. Our spectroscopic sample ranges between 1 and 200 days post-explosion and has a median ejecta expansion velocity at 50 days post-explosion of 6500 km/s (Halpha line) and a standard dispersion of 2000 km/s. Nebular spectra are in good agreement with theoretical models using a progenitor star having a mass <16 Msol. All the data are available to the community and will help to understand SN II diversity better, and therefore to improve their utility as cosmological distance indicators., Comment: 24 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

We present the first results from a reverberation-mapping campaign undertaken during the first half of 2012, with additional data on one AGN (NGC 3227) from a 2014 campaign. Our main goals are (1) to determine the black hole masses from continuum-Hbeta reverberation signatures, and (2) to look for velocity-dependent time delays that might be indicators of the gross kinematics of the broad-line region. We successfully measure Hbeta time delays and black hole masses for five AGNs, four of which have previous reverberation mass measurements. The values measured here are in agreement with earlier estimates, though there is some intrinsic scatter beyond the formal measurement errors. We observe velocity dependent Hbeta lags in each case, and find that the patterns have changed in the intervening five years for three AGNs that were also observed in 2007., Comment: Accepted for publication on ApJ; 32 pages, 16 figures, 10 tables

We present optical continuum lags for two Seyfert 1 galaxies, MCG+08-11-011 and NGC 2617, using monitoring data from a reverberation mapping campaign carried out in 2014. Our light curves span the ugriz filters over four months, with median cadences of 1.0 and 0.6 days for MCG+08-11-011 and NGC\,2617, respectively, combined with roughly daily X-ray and near-UV data from Swift for NGC 2617. We find lags consistent with geometrically thin accretion-disk models that predict a lag-wavelength relation of $\tau \propto \lambda^{4/3}$. However, the observed lags are larger than predictions based on standard thin-disk theory by factors of 3.3 for MCG+08-11-011 and 2.3 for NGC\,2617. These differences can be explained if the mass accretion rates are larger than inferred from the optical luminosity by a factor of 4.3 in MCG+08-11-011 and a factor of 1.3 in NGC\,2617, although uncertainty in the SMBH masses determines the significance of this result. While the X-ray variability in NGC\,2617 precedes the UV/optical variability, the long 2.6 day lag is problematic for coronal reprocessing models., Comment: Accepted to ApJ, please send comments to faus@mit.edu. 24 pages, 8 figures

When the Trump administration announced the Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Program (IRAP) model in June 2017, it was a promising development seeking to provide a flexible alternative to the long-standing Registered Apprenticeship [...]

We present the first results from an optical reverberation mapping campaign executed in 2014, targeting the active galactic nuclei (AGN) MCG+08-11-011, NGC 2617, NGC 4051, 3C 382, and Mrk 374. Our targets have diverse and interesting observational properties, including a "changing look" AGN and a broad-line radio galaxy. Based on continuum-H$\beta$ lags, we measure black hole masses for all five targets. We also obtain H$\gamma$ and He{\sc ii}\,$\lambda 4686$ lags for all objects except 3C 382. The He{\sc ii}\,$\lambda 4686$ lags indicate radial stratification of the BLR, and the masses derived from different emission lines are in general agreement. The relative responsivities of these lines are also in qualitative agreement with photoionization models. These spectra have extremely high signal-to-noise ratios (100--300 per pixel) and there are excellent prospects for obtaining velocity-resolved reverberation signatures., Comment: 34 pages, 12 figures, published in ApJ. For a video summarizing the main results, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaC-jPsIY0Q

Executive Summary This tool kit provides an updated overview of Utah's innovative approach to managing and allocating federal funds for workforce development and social assistance programs. Utah's designation as a [...]

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, I am pleased with the opportunity to discuss reauthorization of the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program. I last testified about TAA to the [...]

Key Points * The incoming Joe Biden administration has three workforce pillars, none of which addresses more near-term COVID-19 recovery steps or funds to support state and local workforce and [...]

Solar Energetic Particles (SEPs) show a rich variety of spectra and relative abundances of many ionic species and their isotopes. A long standing puzzle has been the extreme enrichments of 3He ions. The most extreme enrichments are observed in low fluence, the so-called impulsive, events which are believed to be produced at the flare site in the solar corona with little scattering and acceleration during transport to the Earth. In two earlier papers (Liu et al. 2004 and 2006) we showed how such extreme enrichments can result in the model developed by Petrosian and Liu (2004), where ions are accelerated stochastically by plasma waves or turbulence. In this paper we address the relative distributions of the fluences of 3He and 4He ions presented by Ho et al. (2005) which show that while the distribution of 4He fluence like many other extensive characteristics of solar flare, is fairly broad, the 3He fluence is limited to a narrow range. Moreover, the ratio of the fluences shows a strong correlation with the 4He fluence. One of the predictions of our model was presence of steep variation of the fluence ratio with the level of turbulence or the rate of acceleration. We show here that this feature of the model can reproduce the observed distribution of the fluences with very few free parameters. The primary reason for the success of the model in both fronts is because fully ionized 3He ion, with its unique charge to mass ratio, can resonantly interact with more plasma modes and accelerate more readily than 4He. Essentially in most flares, all background 3He ions are accelerated to few MeV/nucleon range, while this happens for 4He ions only in very strong events. A much smaller fraction of 4He ions reach such energies in weaker events., Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, submitted to ApJ

We have developed a radio-frequency resonant spin rotator to reverse the neutron polarization in a 9.5 cm x 9.5 cm pulsed cold neutron beam with high efficiency over a broad cold neutron energy range. The effect of the spin reversal by the rotator on the neutron beam phase space is compared qualitatively to RF neutron spin flippers based on adiabatic fast passage. The spin rotator does not change the kinetic energy of the neutrons and leaves the neutron beam phase space unchanged to high precision. We discuss the design of the spin rotator and describe two types of transmission-based neutron spin-flip efficiency measurements where the neutron beam was both polarized and analyzed by optically-polarized 3He neutron spin filters. The efficiency of the spin rotator was measured to be 98.0+/-0.8% on resonance for neutron energies from 3.3 to 18.4 meV over the full phase space of the beam. As an example of the application of this device to an experiment we describe the integration of the RF spin rotator into an apparatus to search for the small parity-violating asymmetry A_gamma in polarized cold neutron capture on para-hydrogen by the NPDGamma collaboration at LANSCE.

Parity-odd asymmetries in the electromagnetic decays of compound nuclei can sometimes be amplified above values expected from simple dimensional estimates by the complexity of compound nuclear states. In this work we use a statistical approach to estimate the root mean square (RMS) of the distribution of expected parity-odd correlations $\vec{s_{n}} \cdot \vec{k_{\gamma}}$, where $\vec {s_{n}}$ is the neutron spin and $\vec{k_{\gamma}}$ is the momentum of the gamma, in the integrated gamma spectrum from the capture of cold polarized neutrons on Al, Cu, and In and we present measurements of the asymmetries in these and other nuclei. Based on our calculations, large enhancements of asymmetries were not predicted for the studied nuclei and the statistical estimates are consistent with our measured upper bounds on the asymmetries., Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures

Research over the past to years has shown that the federal government funds over 40 employment and job-training programs across a host of federal agencies. (1) Several programs provide broad [...]

A key tenet of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) of 2014 is to promote better collaboration, alignment, and reporting among multiple adult and youth employment, job-training, and education [...]

Executive Summary The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic and employment crises that have ensued have put unprecedented pressure on the US workforce system. Tens of millions of Americans, particularly [...]

The United States government has funded various employment and job-training programs since the 1930s. Many of these programs remain in effect today, including the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). WIOA provides funding for services targeted at low-income adults, dislocated workers, and disadvantaged youth and mandates the structure of one-stop service delivery among a number of programs that provide federal funds to states. However, while mandating one-stop service delivery, WIOA provides few tools for state and local officials to integrate programs and funds, making it challenging to realize the vision of true one-stop service delivery. This report demonstrates the challenges of mandating employment and job-training coordination through WIOA because programs, policies, and funding incentivizes continued program delivery separation. First, during the past five decades, federal programs have continued to be created and authorized across multiple federal agencies, each with different interest group constituencies and bureaucratic layers. Second, opportunities to undertake significant reforms of many federal programs simply have not materialized. Rather, federal program reform attempts are often contradictory--while attempting to provide 'flexibility' to states to deliver employment and job-training services, additional unnecessary mandates are placed in federal law that induce inefficiencies and hamper effectiveness in an attempt to protect the various interest groups' piece of the federal appropriations pie. Finally, more funding to serve more employers and workers does not address the issue of a duplicative, fragmented, and confusing service delivery architecture. In fact, more funding only exacerbates and incentivizes separate program delivery through separate agencies and bureaucracies. To demonstrate attempts at rationalizing fragmented federal employment and job-training delivery on the ground, this report examines three states at different places on the spectrum. Virginia is a state that remains 'siloed' in its approach with numerous state agencies overseeing employment and jobtraining programs. Conversely, Utah represents a highly integrated state where one state agency administers and delivers almost all the major employment and job-training programs funded by the federal government. Finally, Kentucky represents a state in the midst of reforms of its service delivery system based on labor market conditions and a desire to streamline services to customers., The United States government has funded employment and training programs since the New Deal in the 1930s. The Wagner-Peyser Act of 1933 created the United States Employment Service (ES), one [...]