Fixing America's School Lunch Program: Local Issues, National Challenges, and Global Perspectives on Possible Solutions

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) has undergone profound changes since its establishment in the 1930s with a primary goal of feeding undernourished school children. Today, the program is under scrutiny for its negative impact on student health and environmental unsustainability. This project investigates the origins of the NSLP, the current status of the program, and opportunities for reform. In view of the program's deficiencies, much can be learned by studying other relevant models for school lunch, such as those used in Italy and France. While recognizing the political realities and budgetary constraints public schools currently confront, the Business Plan applies these lessons in its proposals for rethinking the school lunch program at one Denver public school.

Human Trafficking of Women and Children in the Philippines: Challenges and Solutions

Women and children become victims of human trafficking and exploitation as a result of economic globalization, national history, social structures, and geographical positioning. Human trafficking has increasingly become a global crisis of human rights violations, threatening the lives of women and children in developing countries, like the Philippines. The Philippines can evolve into a model for ending the exploitation of human trafficking if the government commits to implementing internationally recognized strategies, such as strengthening the prosecution of traffickers, providing efficient support for victims, and partnering with international organizations and local non-governmental organizations to further prevent human trafficking from occurring. The results will be felt locally, nationally, and internationally, helping the global community meet the challenges of the Millennium Development Goals.

Challenges and Opportunities in Managing the Aging Workforce: An Investigation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency

The aging workforce is becoming the majority of the working population in the United States. Although the literature on the aging workforce is sizable, little exists on how public agencies use the older workers. This capstone project examines the challenges and opportunities related to the employment of older workers as seen through a case study of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Knowledge gained from a synthesis of the literature review with survey data collected and analyzed will enable HR professionals to better understand the demographic, economic, regulatory, and intellectual influences of the aging workforce. The results from the survey of FEMA employees suggest a basis to plan and implement successful hiring and retention policies related to the aging workforce.

Going beyond traditional QA systems: challenges and keys in opinion question answering

The treatment of factual data has been widely studied in different areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, processing subjective information still poses important challenges. This paper presents research aimed at assessing techniques that have been suggested as appropriate in the context of subjective - Opinion Question Answering (OQA). We evaluate the performance of an OQA with these new components and propose methods to optimally tackle the issues encountered. We assess the impact of including additional resources and processes with the purpose of improving the system performance on two distinct blog datasets. The improvements obtained for the different combination of tools are statistically significant. We thus conclude that the proposed approach is adequate for the OQA task, offering a good strategy to deal with opinionated questions.

The future imagined: Exploring fiction as a means of reflecting on today’s Grand Societal Challenges and tomorrow’s options

European science policy (so-called Horizon 2020) is guided by Grand Societal Challenges (GSCs) with the explicit aim of shaping the future. In this paper we propose an innovative approach to the analysis and critique of Europe’s GSCs. The aim is to explore how speculative and creative fiction offer ways of embodying, telling, imagining, and symbolising ‘futures’, that can provide alternative frames and understandings to enrich the grand challenges of the 21st century, and the related rationale and agendas for ERA and H2020. We identify six ways in which filmic and literary representations can be considered creative foresight methods (i.e. through: creative input, detail, warning, reflection, critique, involvement) and can provide alternative perspectives on these central challenges, and warning signals for the science policy they inform. The inquiry involved the selection of 64 novels and movies engaging with notions of the future, produced over the last 150 years. Content analysis based on a standardised matrix of major themes and sub-domains, allows to build a hierarchy of themes and to identify major patterns of long-lasting concerns about humanity’s future. The study highlights how fiction sees oppression, inequality and a range of ethical issues linked to human and nature’s dignity as central to, and inseparable from innovation, technology and science. It concludes identifying warning signals in four major domains, arguing that these signals are compelling, and ought to be heard, not least because elements of such future have already escaped the imaginary world to make part of today’s experience. It identifies areas poorly defined or absent from Europe's science agenda, and argues for the need to increase research into human, social, political and cultural processes involved in techno-science endeavours.

The Civil Society Forum of the Eastern Partnership four years on: Progress, challenges and prospects. CEPS Special Report, January 2014

Established in 2009, during the Eastern Partnership Summit in Prague, the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum supports the development of civil society organisations from the EU-28 and the six Partnership countries, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. After four years of operation, the Secretariat of the Forum’s Steering Committee commissioned CEPS to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of its programme. This report singles out the institutionalisation and socialisation inculcated among its members as the Forum’s greatest accomplishment. In contrast to its internal developments, it argues that the external policy successes of the Forum remain modest. This report is the first attempt to conduct an in-depth assessment of the Forum's Annual Assembly, the Steering Committee and its Secretariat, the Working Groups and National Platforms. Ten actionable recommendations are put forward aimed at improving the Civil Society Forum’s standing and performance.

The Social Impact of Migration and the Notion of Citizenship for the EU. Ensuing challenges and opportunities for the Union. CEPS Commentaries, 13 March 2014

Documenting the unwelcoming treatment extended by government officials to the poorest EU citizens from other member states, including denying them their EU rights, Elspeth Guild censures these officials for shattering the principle of equality of citizens and of disaggregating Europe into nationals of the member states who can be treated differently simply on the basis of their origins.

Challenges and new beginnings: Priorities for the EU’s new leadership. EPC Challenge Europe Issue 22, September 2014

THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS A COLLECTION OF ARTICLES WHICH ARE AVAILABLE ON THE ARCHIVE AS SEPARATE ARTICLES. There has been a lot of attention on the current transition of power taking place in Brussels. The new EU leadership will be confronted with a number of internal and external challenges. They will have deal with economic stagnation, the negative effects of fragmentation and the need to increase the Union's legitimacy. There is no better moment to take stock of the ‘state of the Union’ and to look ahead into the next European political cycle (2014-2019), focusing not on personalities but on content: what challenges do we face and what should the EU focus on in the coming years? These new beginnings will encounter new challenges, and who better understands the issues than some of the key players in European politics. Challenge Europe brings these players together and explores what social, political and economic challenges are facing Europe, and its’ citizens.

Migration and Integration. Common Challenges and Responses from Europe and Asia

With the signing of the ASEAN Framework Agreement for the Integration of Priority Sectors (FA) in 2004, migration and integration issues gained significance on the agenda. Primarily concerned with increasing economic growth, this framework excludes the integration of low and unskilled migrant workers; instead, ASEAN efforts to address migration and integration issues have been limited to Mutual Recognition Agreements for skilled labour and professionals. After an analysis of migration policy in the region, we highlight specific barriers to the integration of labour migrants in two priority sectors – nursing, which is highly regulated by the state, and Information, Communications and Technology (ICT), which is typically selfregulated and privately run. Despite a MRA for nursing allowing registered nurses to practice in another ASEAN country under supervision of local nurses without registering with the host country’s nursing regulatory authority, in practice, there are major barriers to the free movement of nurses within ASEAN in terms of skills recognition, licensure requirements and other protectionist measures. Although regulations governing the inflow of ICT professionals are not as stringent as those for healthcare professionals, private costs associated with job search and gaining foreign employment are higher in the ICT sector, largely due to limited information on international mobility within the industry. Three sets of barriers to greater integration are discussed. First, the economic and political diversity within ASEAN makes integration more problematic than in the European Union. Second, the primary concern with value-adding economic growth means that regional agreements are focused on skilled and professional labour migration only. Third, the “ASEAN way” of doing things – via a strong emphasis on consensus and non-interference with domestic policies – often means that the FA provision for the free movement of labour is usually trumped by domestic policies that do not reflect the same desire for labour integration.