Barr-Klarman Arts Capacity Building Initiative Financial Health Evaluation Summary

This document provides an overview of a financial health evaluation TDC conducted in 2017 to capture the financial health trends of a Boston-based cohort of arts organizations who participated in the Barr-Klarman Arts Capacity Building Initiative (2012-2017), a joint grant program of the Barr Foundation and The Klarman Family Foundation. TDC's financial health evaluation was designed to impart a clear financial picture of the cohort at the program's end, as well as complement the qualitative evaluation of the Initiative (2016-2017) led by Diane Espaldon and Sara Peterson.The financial health evaluation measured the growth and scale of grantees' operations over the course of the Initiative; assessed cumulative financial health; and observed capitalization literacy. TDC evaluators provided each grantee with a capitalization assessment reflecting their organization's balance sheet and income statement trends over the course of the program. Grantees subsequently participated in a follow-up phone interview with TDC to discuss their financial results, and answer questions regarding the impact of the Initiative's capitalization training program on their strategic decision-making and financial goal-setting. With a sample of 30 organizations, TDC evaluated grantee financial performance in the context of each organization's individual goals, not against a cohort-wide benchmark. Cohort-wide trends were elicited from an aggregation of individual performance.This summary document provides an overview of the Initiative's capitalization program, the capitalization framework TDC employed, and high-level results from the financial health evaluation

E-government and the digital divide: A study of English-as-a-Second-Language Users' Information Behaviour

Internet-based technologies are increasingly used by organisations and governments to offer services to consumers and the public in a quick and efficient manner, removing the need for face-to-face conversations and human advisors. Despite their obvious benefits for most users, these online systems may present barriers of access to certain groups in society which may lead to information poverty. In this study we consider the information behaviour of ten ESL (English as a Second Language) participants as they conduct four search tasks designed to reflect actual information seeking situations. Our results suggest that, despite a perception that they have a good understanding of English, they often choose documents that are only partially or tangentially relevant. There were significant differences in the behaviour of participants given their perceived confidence in using English to perform search tasks. Those who were confident took riskier strategies and were less thorough, leading to them bookmarking a larger proportion of non-relevant documents. The results of this work have potentially profound repercussions for how e-government services are provided and how second-language speakers are assisted in their use of these

Synthetic sequence generator for recommender systems - memory biased random walk on sequence multilayer network

Personalized recommender systems rely on each user's personal usage data in the system, in order to assist in decision making. However, privacy policies protecting users' rights prevent these highly personal data from being publicly available to a wider researcher audience. In this work, we propose a memory biased random walk model on multilayer sequence network, as a generator of synthetic sequential data for recommender systems. We demonstrate the applicability of the synthetic data in training recommender system models for cases when privacy policies restrict clickstream publishing.Comment: The new updated version of the pape

Impact of the European Clinical Trials Directive on prospective academic clinical trials associated with BMT

The European Clinical Trials Directive (EU 2001; 2001/20/EC) was introduced to improve the efficiency of commercial and academic clinical trials. Concerns have been raised by interested organizations and institutions regarding the potential for negative impact of the Directive on non-commercial European clinical research. Interested researchers within the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) were surveyed to determine whether researcher experiences confirmed this view. Following a pilot study, an internet-based questionnaire was distributed to individuals in key research positions in the European haemopoietic SCT community. Seventy-one usable questionnaires were returned from participants in different EU member states. The results indicate that the perceived impact of the European Clinical Trials Directive has been negative, at least in the research areas of interest to the EBMT

Towards semantic web mining

Semantic Web Mining aims at combining the two fast-developing research areas Semantic Web and Web Mining. The idea is to improve, on the one hand, the results of Web Mining by exploiting the new semantic structures in the Web; and to make use of Web Mining, on the other hand, for building up the Semantic Web. This paper gives an overview of where the two areas meet today, and sketches ways of how a closer integration could be profitable