Ssa Research Publications

Painâ€"it is the most common complaint presented to physicians. Yet pain is subjectiveâ€"it cannot be measured directly and is difficult to validate. Evaluating claims based on pain poses major problems for the Social Security Administration (SSA) and other disability insurers. This volume covers the epidemiology and physiology of pain; psychosocial contributions to pain and illness behavior; promising ways of assessing and measuring chronic pain and dysfunction; clinical aspects of prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation; and how the SSA's benefit structure and administrative procedures may affect pain complaints.

Socio-scientific issues (SSI) are open-ended, multifaceted social issues with conceptual links to science. They are challenging to negotiate and resolve, and they create ideal contexts for bridging school science and the lived experience of students. This book presents the latest findings from the innovative practice and systematic investigation of science education in the context of socio-scientific issues. Socio-scientific Issues in the Classroom: Teaching, Learning and Research focuses on how SSI can be productively incorporated into science classrooms and what SSI-based education can accomplish regarding student learning, practices and interest. It covers numerous topics that address key themes for contemporary science education including scientific literacy, goals for science teaching and learning, situated learning as a theoretical perspective for science education, and science for citizenship. It presents a wide range of classroom-based research projects that offer new insights for SSI-based education. Authored by leading researchers from eight countries across four continents, this book is an important compendium of syntheses and insights for veteran researchers, teachers and curriculum designers eager to advance the SSI agenda.

Social Security Administration and Abt Associates released a book summarizing lessons from demonstration projects to improve outcomes for disability beneficiaries.

Singular spectrum analysis (SSA) is a technique of time series analysis and forecasting combining elements of classical time series analysis, multivariate statistics, multivariate geometry, dynamical systems and signal processing. SSA seeks to decompose the original series into a sum of a small number of interpretable components such as trend, oscillatory components and noise. It is based on the singular value decomposition of a specific matrix constructed upon the time series. Neither a parametric model nor stationarity are assumed for the time series. This makes SSA a model-free method and hence enables SSA to have a very wide range of applicability. The present book is devoted to the methodology of SSA and shows how to use SSA both safely and with maximum effect. Potential readers of the book include: professional statisticians and econometricians, specialists in any discipline in which problems of time series analysis and forecasting occur, specialists in signal processing and those needed to extract signals from noisy data, and students taking courses on applied time series analysis.