Unique construction makes interferometer insensitive to mechanical stresses

Michelson-type interferometer with a cat-eye reflector operates effectively even in the presence of random mechanical stresses. A cubical beamsplitter with dichroic surfaces permits operation in infrared or visible light

Advocacy & Public Policy Grantmaking: Matching Process to Purpose

Over the past five years, advocacy and public policy grantmaking has moved away from supporting individual grantees to achieve their particular policy goals toward a more targeted, proactive approach designed to achieve the funder's policy goals. More recently, some funders have begun to explore new ways of designing advocacy and public policy grantmaking to achieve longer-term and more substantial changes in the policy landscape at large. As foundations consider how to approach their advocacy and public policy grantmaking in the future, a better understanding of this variety of approaches, and pros and cons of each among foundations with a long history of policy work, may provide options for framing and focusing such efforts.Building on research conducted in 2007 by Coffman and Campbell, this brief summarizes advocacy and public policy grantmaking approaches and their implications for grant portfolio composition and management, auxiliary supports and evaluation. "Advocacy and public policy grantmaking" refers to grantmaking in support of a wide range of advocacy activities that are intend to trigger, block, maintain, support and/or monitor changes in public policy at any level of government. The findings below emerged from an extensive literature review, as well as interviews with staff at 14 foundations and three independent consultants with in-depth policy experience. Interviewees were selected to represent an array of foundation sizes, content areas and structures, all with mature policy portfolios. Foundation staff were asked to describe their foundation's approach to advocacy and public policy grantmaking, including:The foundation's goals for its advocacy and policy grantsWhat the foundation has learned about how best to structure grantmaking and construct a portfolio to achieve its goalsWhat auxiliary supports (e.g., convenings, technical assistance, etc.) the foundation provides that have proven indispensable to its workHow the foundation defines the role of its policy staff, and how these staff interact with other staffHow the foundation designs reporting and conducts (or would like to conduct) evaluationHow the foundation thinks about its role in the larger field of "actors" in the advocacy field and in relation to other funders.The assessment revealed two approaches to advocacy and public policy grantmaking for which foundation practices and processes are fairly well established: a policy target approach to achieve the passage, successful implementation and maintenance of a funder's specific policy goal; and an advocacy niche approach to strengthen the presence or influence of a particular strategic function (i.e., policy analysis and research or grassroots mobilization) within the policymaking process. In addition, the assessment identified an emerging approach to advocacy and public policy grantmaking that has yet to be well defined: a field-building approach to develop the stability and long-term adaptive capacity of a group -- or field -- of advocacy organizations. Many funders choose a combination of these approaches, and some prefer to be more strongly positioned within a single approach. Approaches are not mutually exclusive, and may even be mutually supportive; but each approach has unique implications for grantee selection, organizational processes, program officer roles and evaluation.This report frames a series of options for advocacy and public policy grantmaking and explores implications for foundation practices by drawing on the best experiences from the field. It presents a particular focus on what it means for foundations to design their grantmaking to build the capacity and influence of a field of advocates to tackle a wide range of policy challenges over time. As such, this brief can help foundation staff and leadership establish a common language and understand trade-offs among the different advocacy strategy paths

Cooled echelle grating spectrometer

A cooled echelle grating spectrometer for detecting wavelengths between one micron and fifteen microns is disclosed. More specifically, the spectrometer has a cross-dispersing grating for ordering infrared energy and an echelle grating for further ordering of the infrared energy. Ordered radiation from the echelle grating is sensed by a detecting means. Also disclosed is use of a Schmidt camera for focusing the further ordered radiation from the echelle grating onto a detector array having individual detectors dispersed on a plane which substantially corresponds to a curved focal plane of the Schmidt camera. A spectrometer constructed according to the teachings of the present invention will continuously cover the spectrum between one micron and fifteen microns and have a resolution of 0.1/cm

Solving Colorado's Health Professionals Shortage: Initial Lessons Learned From the Health Professions Initiative Evaluation

Gives an overview of the trust's 2005-08 Health Professions Initiative to address expected shortages in all healthcare professions, its impact so far, and the strategies grantees are implementing to help strengthen the training infrastructure

Evaluating Social Innovation

The philanthropic sector has been experimenting with innovative grantmaking in the hopes of triggering significant and sustainable change. FSG's latest research report, collaboratively written with the Center for Evaluation Innovation, challenges grantmakers to explore the use of Developmental Evaluation when evaluating complex, dynamic, and emergent initiatives

Solving Colorado's Shortage of Health Professionals: Final Evaluation Findings and Recommendations

This report shares evaluation findings from The Trust's Health Professions initiative, and recommends strategies to increase and sustain Colorado's health professions workforce. For example, creating awareness and readiness for health professions training; providing flexible training options and reaching out to students in rural areas; supporting faculty development and clinical training opportunities; expanding the reach and content of training programs; and strengthening community partnerships for recruitment and retention of health professionals

Analytics and complexity: learning and leading for the future

There is growing interest in the application of learning analytics to manage, inform and improve learning and teaching within higher education. In particular, learning analytics is seen as enabling data-driven decision making as universities are seeking to respond a range of significant challenges that are reshaping the higher education landscape. Experience over four years with a project exploring the use of learning analytics to improve learning and teaching at a particular university has, however, revealed a much more complex reality that potentially limits the value of some analytics-based strategies. This paper uses this experience with over 80,000 students across three learning management systems, combined with literature from complex adaptive systems and learning analytics to identify the source and nature of these limitations along with a suggested path forward

Population scenarios and policy implications for South Mediterranean countries, 2010-2050

Four population scenarios were derived describing changes in indicators of demographic behaviour should people come to live in different future political-economic contexts. Focus of this policy brief is on expected trends in (1) population growth at regional and national levels, (2) working age populations in view of demographic dividend potential for the economy, and (3) population of elderly persons in view of the future financial burden this group might impose on societies. Results show that different economic-political development scenarios do have large effects on population growth, at least up to 2030). This is due to the socalled population momentum effect in the relatively young age-structures of most SMCs. In the short term, up to 2030, and depending on which economic-political unfolds, SMCs expected to grow from 280 million people to a figure between 362 and 349 million people. Thus, in a period of about 20 years SMC populations are expected to grow with a figure between 69 and 83 million. In that same period, EU27 populations will grow with 21 million only from about 500 to 521 million people. Between 2030 and 2050, additional population growth is foreseen in SMCs, between 48 and 62 million people, while EU27 populations are expected to grow with only 4 million during that period. SMCs appear to vary widely regarding demographic transition profiles so that demographic dividend potentials also vary. For instance, Egypt has considerably demographic dividend potential ahead in the coming decades as working age population shares will rise from 63% (2010) to a peak level of about 68% by 2045. In Turkey though, the working age population share is already high (68%) and near the expected peak level of 69% (by 2025) after which a decline sets in. The window of opportunity -the period when working age population shares rise to peak levels and remain at a high level- is starting to close for Lebanon and Tunisia though levels will remain high up to 2035 after which a decline sets in due to ageing of these populations. Ageing implies an increase of the economic burden to economies as elderly generally do not contribute any longer to economies as they did during their working age years. Old-age dependency ratios, the share of elderly in relation to the working age population, are still low compared to EU27 ratios but will increase after 2035. Should SMCs remain politically, economically and environmentally fragile in the coming decades, these lower dependency ratios will impose a relatively higher social and financial burden to societies than the high dependency ratios in EU countries

Maximal Ergodic Inequalities for Banach Function Spaces

We analyse the Transfer Principle, which is used to generate weak type maximal inequalities for ergodic operators, and extend it to the general case of $\sigma$-compact locally compact Hausdorff groups acting measure-preservingly on $\sigma$-finite measure spaces. We show how the techniques developed here generate various weak type maximal inequalities on different Banach function spaces, and how the properties of these function spaces influence the weak type inequalities that can be obtained. Finally, we demonstrate how the techniques developed imply almost sure pointwise convergence of a wide class of ergodic averages.Comment: 46 pages. The former Lemma 4.7 and Theorem 4.8 (which had a small gap in the proof) is replaced by Theorem 4.7. This change affects the latter part of section