How Boston and Other American Cities Support and Sustain the Arts: Funding for Cultural Nonprofits in Boston and 10 Other Metropolitan Centers

A new study commissioned by the Boston Foundation on how Boston and comparable cities support the arts shows that only New York City has higher per capita contributed revenue for the art than Boston, among major American cities.The study, titled "How Boston and Other American Cities Support and Sustain the Arts: Funding for Cultural Nonprofits in Boston and 10 Other Metropolitan Cities," also examined Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Philadelphia, Portland Oregon, San Francisco, and Seattle. "How Boston" is a follow-up of sorts to a 2003 Boston Foundation report titled, "Funding for Cultural Organizations in Boston and Nine Other Metropolitan Areas."Key findings of this study, regarding Boston, include the fact that Boston's arts market is quite densely populated. While Greater Boston is the nation's 10th largest metro area and ranks ninth for total Gross Domestic Product, its non-profit arts market, which consists of more than 1,500 organizations, is comparable to that of New York and San Francisco, and consistently surpasses large cities such as Houston, Chicago and Philadelphia, in terms of the number of organizations and their per capita expenses

Passion & Purpose: Restructuring, Repositioning and Reinventing: Crisis in the Massachusetts Nonprofit Sector

Examines how the economic downturn has affected nonprofits in Massachusetts and nationwide and how they, funders, and stakeholders are reacting. Explores cash availability, cost-cutting measures, creative mergers, and potential impact of stimulus funding

Geography and Giving: The Culture of Philanthropy in New England and the Nation

Looks at aggregate household wealth and income at the national level and for Massachusetts as a state, and analyzes levels of charitable giving in relation to household income

Reaching for the Cap and Gown: Progress Toward Success Boston's College Completion Goals for Graduates of the Boston Public Schools

A new report, prepared for Mayor Martin J. Walsh and the Success Boston college completion initiative, shows a remarkable increase in both the percentage and the number of Boston Public Schools graduates who complete college within six years. The report also examines college completion for students with Success Boston coaches, a major intervention launched by the Boston Foundation and its partners, including the Boston Public Schools, in 2009. Success Boston, a citywide multi-sector college completion initiative, was launched in 2008 in response to a report that found that only 35% of the BPS Class of 2000 graduates who enrolled in college earned a degree within seven years of graduating high school. The initiative is guided by the Boston Public Schools, the Boston Foundation, UMass Boston, Bunker Hill Community College, and the Boston Private Industry Council, along with dozens of colleges, universities, and nonprofit organizations. Among the initiative's ambitious goals was pushing members of the BPS Class of 2009 to a 52%six-year college completion rate. Today's report, "Reaching for the Cap and Gown: Progress Toward Success Boston's College Completion Goals for Graduates of the Boston Public Schools," finds that the six-year college completion rate of first-year college enrollees from the BPS Class of 2009 was 51.3%--within one percentage point of the 52% goal set in 2008. Equally impressive is the gain in the number of BPS graduates completing college within six years of high school graduation--1,314 from the Class of 2009, compared to 735 from the Class of 2000, the equivalent of a 79% increase. The study also finds that college completion, at 54.7%, is even higher than the goal for students who enrolled in the fall immediately after graduating from high school

The Garstang Accent

There has been little research done into the Lancashire accent, particularly at a descriptive level but also from a soeiophonetic standpoint. The aim of this study is to identi& and describe the accent of Garstang as it exists now. This was done by conducting a study of twenty people, aged between twenty and over eighty and living in a four mile radius of the centre of Garstang. The data consists of recorded interviews, informal conversation, and some formal tasks. Auditory and acoustic analysis was performed on the data in order to provide a phoneme inventory and aspects such as rhoticity, glottaling and plosives were examined in greater detail. A further element of the research was to investigate whether a language change was taking place, and, if so, which sociophonetic influences were responsible for the changes. Groups were therefore divided according to age, gender and location (rural or urban). In recent years, Garstang has experienced a steady rise in inhabitants from the more urban and industrial areas, and opportunities for contact-induced leveling have increased. Transport to cities and large areas of population is easily accessible and both diffusion and regional identity issues may have an effect on language outcome. Results showed considerable variation in the accent, and also that many features that may have been commonplace in the area, such as rhoticity, have now disappeared, with the younger group showing no evidence of them. Other features of a 'broad accent', if not an accent unique to Garstang, such as lack of diphthonging, are also limited to older speakers, with younger speakers appearing to opt for a wider-based general northern accent. Sociophonetic analysis suggests that the older, more rural group use more traditional dialect forms and the younger group, particularly the urban inhabitants, use forms such as glottaling, which are widespread throughout the country

Are current analytical methods suitable to verify VITAL® 2.0/3.0 allergen reference doses for EU allergens in foods?

Food allergy affects up to 6% of Europeans. Allergen identification is important for the risk assessment and management of the inadvertent presence of allergens in foods. The VITAL® initiative for voluntary incidental trace allergen labeling suggests protein reference doses, based on clinical reactivity in food challenge studies, at or below which voluntary labelling is unnecessary. Here, we investigated if current analytical methodology could verify the published VITAL® 2.0 doses, that were available during this analysis, in serving sizes between 5 and 500 g. Available data on published and commercial ELISA, PCR and mass spectrometry methods, especially for the detection of peanuts, soy, hazelnut, wheat, cow's milk and hen's egg were reviewed in detail. Limit of detection, quantitative capability, matrix compatibility, and specificity were assessed. Implications by the recently published VITAL® 3.0 doses were also considered. We conclude that available analytical methods are capable of reasonably robust detection of peanut, soy, hazelnut and wheat allergens for levels at or below the VITAL® 2.0 and also 3.0 doses, with some methods even capable of achieving this in a large 500 g serving size. Cow's milk and hen's egg are more problematic, largely due to matrix/processing incompatibility. An unmet need remains for harmonized reporting units, available reference materials, and method ring-trials to enable validation and the provision of comparable measurement results