Aspire Public Schools: Building the Organizational Capacity for Healthy Growth

Two years into an aggressive expansion plan, Aspire Public Schools was on track in terms of school openings but behind on its goals to add a layer of management. The schools were performing well, but the nonprofit's leaders were stretched paper thin and concerned about the organization's ability to perform in the face of more growth. Determined to build an organization that could support their expansion plans, the Aspire team took swift action. Their initiatives included:Articulating criteria for "healthy growth" that they would use to assess expansion opportunities, thereby incorporating organizational sustainability into any future decisions about growth;Addressing a profound anxiety about hiring "outsiders" and delegating responsibilities to an increasingly larger team;Defining the boundaries of accountability for each of the organization's leadership positions;Clarifying decision-making authority at a broad level, and making explicit the roles and responsibilities associated with specific and potentially contentious decisions

Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans (AAMA): Focusing for Impact

In 2005 the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans (AAMA) was providing services to more than 30,000 individuals annually through nearly 30 different programs. Its extensive program portfolio served clients of all ages and of many ethnic and racial groups in five Texas cities. All signs were pointing to growth: AAMA's services were in increasing demand given the soaring Latino population; AAMA's leadership was eager for the organization to magnify its impact; multiple funding partners were interested in investing in AAMA's expansion.While the growth imperative was unambiguous, the specific path was not. Should AAMA's leadership expand all of the organization's programs, or concentrate on a few? To chart a course, they got crystal clear about the people they most wanted to serve (first and foremost at-risk Mexican American youth in Texas) and the benefits they wanted to help create for these individuals (e.g., increased college graduation rates, improved job preparedness, decreased substance abuse). Reviewing AAMA's programs, they saw that some were better aligned with these priorities than others. Acting on this information, they concluded that AAMA could do the most good by focusing its energies on enhancing and growing the tightly-aligned programs

Blog, Blogger, Blogging

Presentation slidesThe cover story of Business Week (5/2/2005) was “Blogs will change your business.” Newsweek runs a column called “Blog Watch.” What does this have to do with your library? New Scientist (1/8/2005) reports that in 2004, the number of bloggers soared by 58%. Some are probably your library’s users. This session will give an overview of weblog & RSS fundamentals, illustrated by library blogs. New developments, like podcasting, will be covered

Root architecture governs plasticity in response to drought

Aims: Root characteristics are important for predicting plant and ecosystem responses to resource scarcity. Simple, categorical traits for roots could be broadly applied to ecosystem function and restoration experiments, but they need to be evaluated for their role and behaviour under various stresses, including water limitation. We hypothesised that more complex root architectures allow more plastic responses to limited water than do tap roots. Methods: We carried out two greenhouse experiments: one with a range of grassland plant species; the other with only species of Asteraceae to test the responsiveness of root architectural classes to location of limited water in the soil column. Using trait screening techniques and X-ray tomography, we measured the plasticity of the roots in response to water location. Results: Plasticity of root biomass was lowest in tap rooted species, while fibrous and rhizomatous roots allocated biomass preferentially to where the soil was wettest. X-ray tomography indicated that root morphology was least plastic in rhizomatous species. Conclusions: Our results provide a starting point to effective categorisation of plants in terms of rooting architecture that could aid in understanding drought tolerance of grassland species. They also demonstrate the utility of X-ray tomography in root analyses

Introducing Media Literacy to Undergraduate Students

Despite the pervasiveness of media into all aspects of most peoples’ lives, many people still perceive "media" as only television ads and newspaper articles. The truth is that media is all around us all the time, impacting us in ways we don't, but should, recognize. This instructional module was designed to introduce undergraduate students to the concept of “media literacy,” or of being aware how ubiquitous a presence media has in our lives. The web-based module used pre-, embedded, and post-assessments, videos, images, and narrative to introduce media literacy. Pre-assessments showed that students had minimal pre-existing knowledge of media literacy and post-test results showed an improvement in understanding of the material presented. Most of the responses to the three open-ended post-test questions were informative and positive. This study shows a need for media literacy education and this researcher hopes to market this tutorial to instructors and students in all subject areas

Mookini Library Tutorials: Enhancing the discovery of library services and development of student research skills through short online instruction videos

Presentation slidesTools, techniques, and preliminary usability survey results will be shared to show how one library developed, on a minimal budget, a video tutorial series to support remote learning for students at UH Hilo & Hawaiʻi Community Colleg

Displays Made Easy

Presentation slidesAre your displays looking tired? Are you running out of ideas and inspiration? Are you trying to connect with your patrons better but your library is short on funds? Staff and Librarians from Mookini Library will show you how to create interesting, low-budget, no-technology, interactive displays highlighting materials in your collections. These fun displays can feature books, CDs, DVDs, and more and be themed for favorite artists, time of the year, or local events. These displays also solicit input from your users, involving them in activities

Consistency of Eye Coloration Across Different Relationship Partners

Studies have indicated that people are attracted to partners who resemble themselves or their parents, in terms of physical traits including eye color. We might anticipate this inclination to be relatively stable, giving rise to a sequential selection of similar partners who then represent an individual’s “type”. We tested this idea by examining whether people’s sequential partners resembled each other at the level of eye color. We gathered details of the eye colors of the partners of participants (N = 579) across their adult romantic history (N = 3250 relationships), in three samples, comprising two samples which made use of self-reports from predominantly UK-based participants, and one which made use of publicly available information about celebrity relationship histories. Recorded partner eye colors comprised black (N = 39 partners), dark brown (N = 884), light brown (N = 393), hazel (N = 224), blue (N = 936), blue green (N = 245), grey (N = 34), and green (N = 229). We calculated the proportion of identical eye colors within each participant’s relationship history, and compared that to 100,000 random permutations of our dataset, using t-tests to investigate if the eye color of partners across an individual’s relationship history was biased relative to chance (i.e., if there was greater consistency, represented by higher calculated proportions of identical eye colors, in the original dataset than in the permutations). To account for possible eye color reporting errors and ethnic group matching, we ran the analyses restricted to White participants and to high-confidence eye color data; we then ran the analyses again in relation to the complete dataset. We found some limited evidence for some consistency of eye color across people’s relationship histories in some of the samples only when using the complete dataset. We discuss the issues of small effect sizes, partner report bias, and ethnic group matching in investigating partner consistency across time

Accidental Chemical Releases and Local Emergency Response: Analysis Using the Acute Hazardous Events Data Base

An Acute Hazardous Events Data Base (AHE/DB) has been developed that codifies the characteristics of over 11,000 accidental releases of toxic chemicals in the United States, primarily from 1980 to 1986. Initially developed as part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency\u27s response to the 1984 toxic chemical release in Bhopal, India, the AHE/DB has been adapted into a tool for use in Community-Right-to-Know (CRTK) applications. Analysis using the AHE/DB for such purposes has indicated that: (1) releases of highly toxic chemicals do appear to lead to more serious consequences, thereby supporting the current CRTK approach of grouping chemicals according to their toxicity properties; and (2) fires or explosions have been significant contributing fac tors in most of the serious accidents in the United States and abroad (the chemical accidents at Bhopal and Seveso represent significant exceptions to this general rule). The latter finding indicates that the role of fires and explo sions, as well as that of toxicity, requires emphasis in the local emergency-plan ning process. © 1988, Sage Publications. All rights reserved