Philanthropic Paths: An Exploratory Study of the Career Pathways of Professionals of Color in Philanthropy

This study, commissioned by the D5 Coalition, provides a nuanced picture of the career experiences of 43 philanthropic professionals of color ranging from Program Officers to CEOs working in an array of foundations. Through an exploration of the perceptions, analyses, and career histories of people of color working in the philanthropic sector, this study aims to advance the field's understanding of the following questions:What are the career pathways of people of color in philanthropy in terms of how they enter the field and advance to higher levels of seniority?What factors do philanthropic professionals of color view as posing the greatest barriers and contributors to career advancement in the sector?What is the perceived value of and challenges to achieving greater leadership diversity in foundations from the perspective of professionals of color in the field? While not generalizable to the broader population of people of color working in the sector, interviews conducted with these individuals surfaced a set of potentially common points of entry and career pathways among professionals of color in philanthropy, as well as the factors that helped shape those pathways

Real-time monitoring of progress in object-aware business processes

A high degree of competition require companies to constantly improve and further develop their business processes (BP). Therefore, optimisations and improvements are an important key element in this endeavour. The monitoring of a BP should detect complications and errors quickly to support this objective. Two approaches can be pursued to achieve this: real-time, also called online, monitoring and offline monitoring. A sub task of real-time monitoring is determining the current progress of a business process. Business processes in PHILharmonicFlows consist of objects with lifecycles, describing the behaviour of an object, and coordination processes, which organise and structure the overall business process. The composition of an object-aware business processes is extremely complex. Many instances of objects and lifecycles exist. Running concurrently to each other. Further, there are coordination constraints between objects that restrict certain executions of the overall business process. Due of the complexity, there is no intuitive solution for real-time monitoring of progress in an object-aware business process. Progress of the overall business process consists of a combination of the individual progress measures to these contributing parts. Therefore, a method called PHILharmonicFlows Progress Determination (PPD-Method) is developed that can be used to determine the progress of object-aware processes. The progress representation provides users with knowledge of the current status. In addition, standstills can be detected quickly and subsequently remedied. As a first step, the PPD-Method uses a fixed snapshot of a business process, taken during execution, to determine progress. This is called a static progress determination and reduces the complexity of the calculation. Based on the static determination, the dynamic aspect of progress execution can be incorporated into the progress determination, such as instantiation of an object or state changes. This lead to dynamic determination of progress. The definition of progress for object-aware processes i.e., what constitutes progress, offers several options. Each option is thoroughly assessed and evaluated. According on the metaphor of a progress bar and the structure of the business process, design choices for progress determination for the PPD-Method are identified based on the best option. Finally, this thesis develops algorithms as part of the PPD-Method for the static determination of object lifecycle progress

The Drama of Alienation: An Interpersonal Examination of Edward Albee\u27s The Zoo Story and Sam Shepard\u27s Buried Child

This study examined alienation from an interpersonal communication perspective in order to find a connection between aspects of alienation and interpersonal communication. Alienation occurs at two levels according to scholars in sociology and psychology. At the social level, one\u27s culture influences behavior in interpersonal relations. At the psychological level, one\u27s perception of self worth influences interpersonal relations. This study used Srole\u27s five aspects of alienation (isolation, estrangement, powerlessness, unpredictability, and meaninglessness) to analyze interpersonal relationships between those alienated on both levels. Two plays were chosen to exemplify how alienated people need close interpersonal communication. The Zoo Story, by Edward Albee (1959), shows how two strangers, separated by self-actualization and material worth, help one another make a close interpersonal connection. Buried Child, by Sam Shepard (1971), shows a dysfunctional family whose members recognize their alienation from themselves, each other, and society

Positional accuracy of the Wide Area Augmentation System

Global Positioning Systems devices are increasingly being used for data collection in many fields. Consumer-grade GPS units without differential correction have a published horizontal accuracy of approximately 10 to 15 meters (average error). An attractive option for differential correction for these GPS units is the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). Most consumer-grade GPS units on the market are WAAS capable. According to the FAA, the WAAS broadcast message provides integrity information about the GPS signal as well as accuracy improvements which are reported to improve accuracy to 3 to 5 meters. However, limited empirical evidence has been published on the accuracy of WAAS-enabled GPS compared to autonomous GPS. Results are presented of an empirical study comparing the horizontal and vertical accuracy of WAAS corrected GPS and autonomous GPS under ideal conditions using consumer-grade receivers. Data were collected for thirty minute time spans over accurately surveyed control points. Metrics of median, 68th and 95th percentile, RMSE and average positional error in x, y and z were computed and statistically tested with a hypothesis test. There was no statistical difference found between WAAS and autonomous position fixes when using two different consumer-grade units. A statistical difference was evident in a third unit type tested. Analysis of data collected for a twenty seven hour time span indicates that while WAAS is altering the estimated position of a point compared to autonomous position estimate, WAAS augmentation actually appears to increase the positional error

Historiography, disciplinarity, and the future(s) of composition.

This dissertation analyzes and critiques the historiography of more than 150 texts documenting the history of writing instruction in the United States. In examining the rhetoric of disciplinary historiography, I demonstrate how the historicization of composition has worked, rhetorically and politically, to highlight and complicate some of the central concerns of the field while also raising questions about and prompting proposals for the future of the discipline. To carry out this analysis, I engage in a process I call metahistorical critique, with which I trace three disciplinary narratives: the role of first-year composition, the discipline\u27s legacy of current-traditional rhetoric and pedagogy, and composition\u27s relationship to other disciplines. I argue that metahistorical critique can reveal many of the discipline\u27s primary values and practices, which today create important possibilities and limitations in the ways composition scholars construct the past, present, and future of the field. I introduce the dissertation by laying the theoretical groundwork for my reading of disciplinary historiography using Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and Dominick LaCapra. In Chapter 2, I focus on how historians have used current-traditional rhetoric and pedagogy (CTRP) problematically as a trope, neglecting actual historical phenomena. In Chapter 3, I argue that composition historians\u27 persistent focus on first-year composition (FYC) and the debate surrounding its viability as a required academic course allows the discipline tends to think of and define work, writing, and writing instruction as a problematically abstract, monolingual, institutionalized, pedagogically produced and reader-oriented practice relevant only to Americans. Chapter 4 explores how the relationship between composition and other disciplines has (or has not) been historicized in order to argue that the discipline should be rehistoricized as an interdiscipline. I conclude that if we are to allow for other questions and narratives about the discipline to emerge, and if we intend to promote ethical ways of engaging with teachers, students, and the world, we must continually interrogate the prevailing narratives that shape the field, as well as our habits of thinking, reading, and writing about the history of writing instruction in the United States and elsewhere

Psychosocial Constraints on the Development of Resilience

Although resilience is usually thought to reside in individuals, developmental research is increasingly demonstrating that characteristics of the social context may be better predictors of resilience. When the relative contribution of early resilience and environmental challenges to later child mental health and academic achievement were compared in a longitudinal study from birth to adolescence, indicators of child resilience, such as the behavioral and emotional self-regulation characteristic of good mental health, and the cognitive self-regulation characteristic of high intelligence contributed to later competence. However, the effects of such individual resilience did not overcome the effects of high environmental challenge, such as poor parenting, antisocial peers, low-resource communities, and economic hardship. The effects of single environmental challenges become very large when accumulated into multiple risk scores even affecting the development of offspring in the next generation.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72845/1/annals.1376.010.pd

A One-Dimensional Kalman Filter for Real-Time Progress Prediction in Object Lifecycle Processes

Real-time monitoring of business processes offers promising perspectives to discover problems and optimisation potentials. Early detection is a key part in this endeavour. One crucial aspect of real-time monitoring is to determine the current progress of a running business process. This is particularly challenging for business processes that consist of a multitude of loosely coupled, smaller processes that interact with each other, like object lifecycle processes in data-centric approaches to business process management. In this paper, an approach to predict the remaining portion of the process path to be still executed in relation to the overall process is proposed. This prediction is based on a one-dimensional Kalman Filter. As a major benefit of this approach, real-time progress determination can start directly with the first run of the process, i.e., without need for comprehensive event log data. This becomes possible due to the procedure applied by the Kalman Filter, which requires no log data. A quantitative study with 250 progress estimations for large object lifecycle processes results in a deviation of the average estimated progress from the real progress, calculated after the completion of the process, of about 5%. This emphasises that reasonable progress predictions are possible even in the absence of an event log, as it is the case when deploying new or changed processes to the run-time system

A Dashboard-based Approach for Monitoring Object-Aware Processes

Data (e.g., event logs) gathered during the execution of business processes enable valuable insights into actual process performance. To leverage this knowledge, these data should be analyzed and interpreted in the context of the respective processes. Corresponding analyses allow for a comprehensive process monitoring as well as the discovery of weaknesses and potential process improvements. This also applies to object-aware processes, where data drives process execution and, thus, is treated as first-class citizen. This paper introduces a dashboard with advanced monitoring functions for object-aware processes

Towards Real-Time Progress Determination of Object-Aware Business Processes

To stay competitive, companies need to continuously improve and evolve their business processes. In this endeavour, business process optimisations and improvements are key elements. In particular, the monitoring of business processes enables the early discovery of problems and errors already during process enactment. Two approaches can be pursued to achieve this: real-time, also called online monitoring, and offline monitoring. A subtask of real-time monitoring is to determine the current progress of a business process, which is particularly challenging if the latter is composed of loosely coupled, smaller processes that interact with each other, like object lifecycle processes in data-centric approaches to BPM, which result in large process structures. This position paper discusses the challenges of determining the progress of such object-aware processes in real-time and defines research questions that need to be investigated in further work

Data-Driven Evolution of Activity Forms in Object- and Process-Aware Information Systems

Abstract. Object-aware processes enable the data-driven generation of forms based on the object behavior, which is pre-specified by the respective object lifecycle process. Each state of a lifecycle process comprises a number of object attributes that need to be set (e.g., via forms) before transitioning to the next state. When initially modeling a lifecycle process, the optimal ordering of the form fields is often unknown and only a guess of the lifecycle process modeler. As a consequence, certain form fields might be obsolete, missing, or ordered in a non-intuitive manner. Though this does not affect process executability, it decreases the usability of the automatically generated forms. Discovering respective problems, therefore, provides valuable insights into how object- and process-aware information systems can be evolved to improve their usability. This paper presents an approach for deriving improvements of object lifecycle processes by comparing the respective positions of the fields of the generated forms with the ones according to which the fields were actually filled by users during runtime. Our approach enables us to discover missing or obsolete form fields, and additionally considers the order of the fields within the generated forms. Finally, we can derive the modeling operations required to automatically restructure the internal logic of the lifecycle process states and, thus, to automatically evolve lifecycle processes and corresponding forms