Looking Back at Five Eras: The Mott Foundation's First 75 Years

Summarizes five distinct eras in the foundation's first 75 years, and takes a look forward to continuing the practice of building long-term relationships and partnering with community groups in order to enable philanthropy at the local level

The Challenge of Nonprofit Leadership: Building a Transformed World

This speech by William S. White, President of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation was the opening keynote address delivered at Independent Sector's Annual Conference on November 4, 2001, in Atlanta, Georgia. In this discourse, he laid out the fundamental needs for leadership, and the challenges facing the nonprofit community in meeting those needs

Genetic heterogeneity of residual variance in broiler chickens

Aims were to estimate the extent of genetic heterogeneity in environmental variance. Data comprised 99 535 records of 35-day body weights from broiler chickens reared in a controlled environment. Residual variance within dam families was estimated using ASREML, after fitting fixed effects such as genetic groups and hatches, for each of 377 genetically contemporary sires with a large number of progeny ($>$100 males or females each). Residual variance was computed separately for male and female offspring, and after correction for sampling, strong evidence for heterogeneity was found, the standard deviation between sires in within variance amounting to 15–18% of its mean. Reanalysis using log-transformed data gave similar results, and elimination of 2–3% of outlier data reduced the heterogeneity but it was still over 10%. The correlation between estimates for males and females was low, however. The correlation between sire effects on progeny mean and residual variance for body weight was small and negative (-0.1). Using a data set bigger than any yet presented and on a trait measurable in both sexes, this study has shown evidence for heterogeneity in the residual variance, which could not be explained by segregation of major genes unless very few determined the trait

Seeing Galaxies Through Thick & Thin. III. HST Imaging of the Dust in Backlit Spiral Galaxies

We present analysis of WFPC2 imaging of two spiral galaxies partially backlit by E/S0 systems in the pairs AM1316-241 and AM0500-620, and the spiral foreground system in NGC 1275. Images in B and I are used to determine the reddening curve of in these systems. The spiral component of AM1316-241 shows dust strongly concentrated in discrete arms, with a reddening law very close to the Milky Way mean. The dust distribution is scale-free between about 100 pc and the arm scale. The spiral in AM0500-620 shows dust concentrated in arms and interarm spurs, with measurable interarm extinction as well. Although its dust properties are less well-determined, we find evidence for a steeper extinction law here. The shape of the reddening law suggests that, at least in AM1316-241, we have resolved most of the dust structure. In AM0500-620, the slope of the fractal perimeter-scale relation steepens systematically from low to high extinction. In AM1316-241, we cannot determine a unique fractal dimension from the defining area-perimeter relation, so the projected dust distribution is best defined as fractal-like. In neither galaxy do we see regions even on single-pixel scales in spiral arms with AB > 2.5. The measurements in NGC 1275 are compromised by our lack of independent knowledge of the foreground system's light distribution, but masked sampling of the absorption suggests an effective reddening curve much flatter than the Milky Way mean (perhaps indicating that the foreground system has been affected by immersion in the hot intracluster gas).Comment: Astronomical Journal, in press. 13 figures. Full-size PostScript figures available at http://www.astr.ua.edu/preprints/kee

MP754: A Literature Review of the Effects of Intensive Forestry on Forest Structure and Plant Community Composition at the Stand and Landscape Levels

The effects of intensive forest management on forest structure and plant community composition are not well documented, particularly with respect to the forests in the Northeast. This review presents a six-part synthesis of the literature. The first section considers the effects of intensive forestry practices within the context of naturally regenerated stands. The second section reviews the changes associated with the planting of conifers in softwood sites, as well as those previously occupied by hardwood and mixed-wood stands. The third examines the impacts of intensive management specifically on bryophytes and lichens. The fourth section discusses changes in dead organic matter components of the stand and the fifth with the impact on tree pests. The final section views the effects of intensive forestry from the landscape-scale perspective and is followed by summary and conclusions. While this paper provides a summary of scientific information, it does not recommend policy or propose how the forest should be managed.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/aes_miscpubs/1022/thumbnail.jp