Reducing Biological Risks to Security: International Policy Recommendations for the Obama Administration

Summarizes discussions among biotechnology and life sciences experts on the risks of bioterrorism and threats to public health and agriculture. Assesses current efforts and makes recommendations for strengthening global prevention and response measures

Shared Value in Chile: Increasing Private Sector Competitiveness by Solving Social Problems

Over the last few decades, Chile has experienced rapid and sustained economic, social, and institutional development. Crucial challenges remain, however, in the form of social inequity, lack of opportunity, mistrust, and social unrest. The Chilean private sector is at an inflection point in its relationship with society. The corporate sector has both contributed to and benefited from the growth and development of the last decades, but remaining social challenges pose significant constraints to the continued growth of the private sector. High levels of mistrust regarding the role of business in society reflect a widespread belief that profit making activities are merely a demonstration of corporate greed. The Chilean private sector faces a frequently antagonistic relationship with government and civil society that will likely worsen unless companies are able to find ways to authentically link their businesses to efforts to solve Chile's social problems. On the other hand, if government and civil society conclude that the private sector has no contribution to make to the country's social and economic development strategy, Chile will squander an important engine for creating shared prosperity. The good news is that there does not need to be a trade-off between private sector competitiveness and greater prosperity for all Chileans. Shared value, a concept explained in Harvard Professor Michael Porter and Mark Kramer's Harvard Business Review articles, suggests an approach for companies to increase their competitiveness and profitability by helping to solve social problems. The public sector and civil society can increase the social benefits from shared value by thoughtfully partnering with the private secto

Reading, Writing, and Breathing

This report looks at the distribution of air toxics, respiratory hazard, and school children in the state of California. The report finds evidence of disproportionate exposure and a potential link between such exposure and school-level academic performance, and calls for policy changes that can better situate environmental health concerns within initiatives for school improvement

A review of technology-enhanced Chinese character teaching and learning in a digital context

The acquisition of Chinese characters has been widely acknowledged as challenging for learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) due to their unique logographic nature and the time and effort involved. However, recent advancements in instructional technologies demonstrate a promising role in facilitating the teaching and learning of Chinese characters. This paper examines studies exploring technology-enhanced character teaching and learning (TECTL) through a systematic literature review of relevant publications produced between 2010 and 2021. The synthesized findings shed insights on the research undertaken in the TECTL field, identifying a focus on characters’ component disassembling, re-assembling, and associations among orthography, semantics, and phonology. In addition, learners’ perceptions toward the use of technology and the benefits of various types of technological tools are also discussed in detail. Implications for TECTL are also put forward for future pedagogical practice and exploration

Encouraging Social Innovation Through Capital: Using Technology to Address Barriers

Outlines how technology can help foster a robust capital market for public education innovation by improving content, linking technology with face-to-face networks, and streamlining transactions. Suggests steps for government, foundations, and developers

Making services work : indicators, assessments, and benchmarking of the quality and governance of public service delivery in the human development sectors

Improving governance is central to improving results in human development. It is clear that money is not enough: improved outcomes from service delivery require better governance, including mechanisms for holding service providers accountable and appropriate incentives for performance. There is therefore a growing demand for indicators to measure how and whether these processes work, and how they affect health and education results. This paper makes the case for measuring governance policies and performance, and the quality of service delivery in health and education. It develops a framework for selecting and measuring a set of indicators and proposes options, drawing from new and innovative measurement tools and approaches. The paper proposes the adoption of a more systematic approach that will both facilitate the work of health and education policymakers and allow for cross-country comparisons and benchmarking.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Governance Indicators,Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Public Sector Expenditure Policy

Basis Token Consistency: A Practical Mechanism for Strong Web Cache Consistency

With web caching and cache-related services like CDNs and edge services playing an increasingly significant role in the modern internet, the problem of the weak consistency and coherence provisions in current web protocols is becoming increasingly significant and drawing the attention of the standards community [LCD01]. Toward this end, we present definitions of consistency and coherence for web-like environments, that is, distributed client-server information systems where the semantics of interactions with resource are more general than the read/write operations found in memory hierarchies and distributed file systems. We then present a brief review of proposed mechanisms which strengthen the consistency of caches in the web, focusing upon their conceptual contributions and their weaknesses in real-world practice. These insights motivate a new mechanism, which we call "Basis Token Consistency" or BTC; when implemented at the server, this mechanism allows any client (independent of the presence and conformity of any intermediaries) to maintain a self-consistent view of the server's state. This is accomplished by annotating responses with additional per-resource application information which allows client caches to recognize the obsolescence of currently cached entities and identify responses from other caches which are already stale in light of what has already been seen. The mechanism requires no deviation from the existing client-server communication model, and does not require servers to maintain any additional per-client state. We discuss how our mechanism could be integrated into a fragment-assembling Content Management System (CMS), and present a simulation-driven performance comparison between the BTC algorithm and the use of the Time-To-Live (TTL) heuristic.National Science Foundation (ANI-9986397, ANI-0095988

Four Essentials for Evaluation

GEO created this guide to help grantmakers get to the next level in their evaluation efforts. The target audience is champions and supporters of evaluation who want to embed these practices more deeply in the work of their organizations.The term "evaluation" can refer to a lot of different activities, including data collection, information gathering and research about grantmaker-supported activities. GEO's emphasis, however, is on "evaluation for learning."Evaluation is about more than ensuring that grantees are doing what they promise, or that a specific program area at a foundation is meeting its goals. Rather, it's about advancing knowledge and understanding among grantmakers, their grantees and their partners about what's working, what's not and how to improve their performance over time.Using evaluation in this way requires grantmakers to transform themselves into learning organizations. Beyond getting smarter about specific evaluation methods and approaches, this means adopting a continuous process, a culture and a commitment to support the capacity of people to see patterns and insights that can lead to ever-improving results