Expanding Your Comfort Zone: A Window into Risk in Family Philanthropy

Philanthropy is often described as society's "risk capital." Our generosity can support causes and ideas that business and government agencies cannot or will not. We can use our resources to inspire new ideas, challenge existing thinking, or continue supporting an organization when others won't.However, the idea of risk in philanthropy quickly muddies as we direct our generosity through a family foundation, donor-advised fund, or other collective effort. Our ideas about and tolerance for risk diverge, shaped by individual, family branch, professional, and other experiences.And, our own brains trip up our thinking about risk and even discourage us from discussing it.In this Passages Issues Brief, you'll learn how generous families can assess philanthropic risk, tame and mitigate risk, and even expand their comfort zone to embrace uncertainty. The issue also should be helpful to other types of grantmaking committees and their staff members

Mexican Rural Communities’ Metabolism and Its Impact on Socioeconomic Indicators

The rural poverty in Mexico is mainly due to the lack of access to basic services, resources, technology, and scientific knowledge. Despite the Mexican government´s efforts to contribute on improving income levels and employment in rural communities, the challenge that faces the communities to achieve sustainable development is very significant. The principal purpose of the study is to analyze the metabolic scaling of cultural, environmental, and economic aspects in the context of Mexican rural communities in order to predict the energy necessary to maintain them connected and to estimate their impact on the improvement of socio-economic indicators. First, we used the socio-metabolic approach to the study of social complex systems in rural context. The social metabolism approach aims at the study of the material and energy exchange relationships between societies and their natural environment. Then, we analyzed the metabolic scaling of cultural, environmental, and economic aspects in the context of Mexican rural communities. Finally, the energy necessary to maintain the community connected and its impact on the socio-economic indicators was evaluated. We consider that results from this study can support the design of public policies focused on the improving the living conditions of Mexican rural communities

Complexity and integration. A philosophical analysis of how cancer complexity can be faced in the era of precision medicine

Complexity and integration are longstanding widely debated issues in philosophy of science and recent contributions have largely focused on biology and biomedicine. This paper specifically considers some methodological novelties in cancer research, motivated by various features of tumours as complex diseases, and shows how they encourage some rethinking of philosophical discourses on those topics. In particular, we discuss the integrative cluster approach, and analyse its potential in the epistemology of cancer. We suggest that, far from being the solution to tame cancer complexity, this approach offers a philosophically interesting new manner of considering integration, and show how it can help addressing the apparent contrast between a pluralistic and a unitary account

Mapping Instructions and Visual Observations to Actions with Reinforcement Learning

We propose to directly map raw visual observations and text input to actions for instruction execution. While existing approaches assume access to structured environment representations or use a pipeline of separately trained models, we learn a single model to jointly reason about linguistic and visual input. We use reinforcement learning in a contextual bandit setting to train a neural network agent. To guide the agent's exploration, we use reward shaping with different forms of supervision. Our approach does not require intermediate representations, planning procedures, or training different models. We evaluate in a simulated environment, and show significant improvements over supervised learning and common reinforcement learning variants.Comment: In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 201

THE INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE TRANSFORMATION: AUROBINDIAN PARADIGM OF CULTURE OF CHANGE

Artikel ini bertolak dari suatu keyakinan bahwa kendati kebudayaan sebagai suatu keseluruhan yang kompleks berkecenderungan mengontrol, ia juga memberikan peluang dan jalan bagi pembentukan karakter dan bagi proses spiritualisasi penciptaan dalam evolusi. Pertumbuhan dan perkembangan suatu bangsa bergantung pada orientasi dasar dan kebiasaan yang telah tertanam lama dalam kebudayaan. Namun di sisi lain, terutama mengacu pada pemikiran Sri Aurobindo, itu juga bergantung pada pencarian dan pencerahan spiritual dalam dunia batin individu . Maka artikel ini mengajukanpentingnya keseimbangan antara dunia luar dan dunia dalam, dunia interaksi sosial dan dunia individu. Yang menjadi fokus dalam artikel ini lantas : apakah kebudayaan memang memungkinkan transformasi individual dan sekaligus transformasi masyarakat

Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

Digitally augmented sketch-planning

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-74).While many aspects of the planning profession have changed radically in light of recent technological advances, the practice of sketching plans has remained largely unaffected. There may be good reasons for eschewing computers in the design arena such as that their use may detract from the liberty of the design thinking process. This thesis suggests that this reluctance may be overcome by changing the practice from one of emulation with digital tools to one of "augmentation". In addressing a perceived need to bring computation to the design table a solution called the "digitally augmented sketch planning environment" (DASPE) has been developed. Making use of video projection, DASPE augments the design space with digital visualization and analysis tools and allows planners to sketch using either conventional media or a pen stylus on a digitizing table. Plans can be sketched in the conventional manner, then "hardened" into three dimensional computer models without the need to leave the design space.by Kenneth Goulding.M.C.P

Untamed Urbanisms

An electronic version of this book is available Open Access at www.tandfebooks.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. One of the major challenges of urban development has been reconciling the way cities develop with the mounting evidence of resource depletion and the negative environmental impacts of predominantly urban-based modes of production and consumption. This book aims to re-politicise the relationship between urban development, sustainability and justice, and to explore the tensions emerging under real circumstances, as well as their potential for transformative change. For some, cities are the root of all that is unsustainable, while for others cities provide unique opportunities for sustainability-oriented innovations that address equity and ecological challenges. This book is rooted in the latter category, but recognises that if cities continue to evolve along current trajectories they will be where the large bulk of the most unsustainable and inequitable human activities are concentrated. By drawing on a range of case studies from both the global South and global North, this book is unique in its aim to develop an integrated social-ecological perspective on the challenge of sustainable urban development. Through the interdisciplinary and original research of a new generation of urban researchers across the global South and North, this book addresses old debates in new ways and raises new questions about sustainable urban development.