DeWitt Wallace Library Annual Report 2014-2015

Summary of library and media services activities for 2014-201

Innovation and the Evidence Base

Innovation has been a persistent theme in probation reform and probation practice over recent years. At a system level, when the Coalition government’s ‘rehabilitation revolution’ was first articulated, it encompassed innovation by frontline staff, by organisations working within a mixed economy and even social entrepreneurs. Under Transforming Rehabilitation, innovation remained a stated aim of probation reform, although the scope of innovation envisaged appeared to have narrowed. Innovation is also integral to ideas of evidence-based and evidence-led practice and there are numerous examples of innovative practice developing within probation and the wider criminal justice system. Applying the ‘innovation lens’ to evidence-based practice also raises interesting questions for the future development of such practice

The Amateur Sky Survey Mark III Project

The Amateur Sky Survey (TASS) is a loose confederation of amateur and professional astronomers. We describe the design and construction of our Mark III system, a set of wide-field drift-scan CCD cameras which monitor the celestial equator down to thirteenth magnitude in several passbands. We explain the methods by which images are gathered, processed, and reduced into lists of stellar positions and magnitudes. Over the period October, 1996, to November, 1998, we compiled a large database of photometric measurements. One of our results is the "tenxcat" catalog, which contains measurements on the standard Johnson-Cousins system for 367,241 stars; it contains links to the light curves of these stars as well.Comment: 20 pages, including 4 figures; additional JPEG files for Figures 1, 2. Submitted to PAS

Homelessness and the Private Rented Sector

Homelessness has a devastating effect on those who experience it and is costly to the public purse. Homelessness acceptances have been increasing since 2009, with the most significant growth being from the private rented sector. The number of such households has grown in absolute terms – from 4580 acceptances in 2009 to 16,320 acceptances in 2017, and as a proportion of all acceptances, from eleven percent to twenty eight percent (MHCLG, 2018). Yet, while there has been some excellent research published recently about particular aspects of this growth, there remain a number of gaps in our understanding. Knowing what is driving recent increases in homelessness from the private rented sector is key to understanding what policy and other changes are necessary to address this proble

Are Social Impact Bonds an innovation in finance or do they help finance social innovation?

Outcomes Based Commissioning (OBC) – for example, Pay for Success (in the US) or Payment by Results (in the UK) – has been suggested as a way to provide ‘more’ social services for ‘less’ public resources. Such commissioning is often linked with an innovative financing tool called a Social Impact Bond (SIB). Using data from the Social Finance UK Database and focusing on SIBs in the US and UK, we evaluate whether the SIB approach aligns with the theoretical predictions of social innovation. The results provide limited evidence that SIBs facilitate capital injections from the private sector into the production of social goods as well as facilitate parts of the process of social innovation – namely, piloting and scaling. We conclude that there is significant variation, both between the US and UK and within the US, in social innovation ecosystems and the role played by SIBs

Comparative physical maps derived from BAC end sequences of tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus)

Background: The Nile tilapia is the second most important fish in aquaculture. It is an excellent laboratory model, and is closely related to the African lake cichlids famous for their rapid rates of speciation. A suite of genomic resources has been developed for this species, including genetic maps and ESTs. Here we analyze BAC endsequences to develop comparative physical maps, and estimate the number of genome rearrangements, between tilapia and other model fish species. Results: We obtained sequence from one or both ends of 106,259 tilapia BACs. BLAST analysis against the genome assemblies of stickleback, medaka and pufferfish allowed identification of homologies for approximately 25,000 BACs for each species. We calculate that rearrangement breakpoints between tilapia and these species occur about every 3 Mb across the genome. Analysis of 35,000 clones previously assembled into contigs by restriction fingerprints allowed identification of longer-range syntenies. Conclusions: Our data suggest that chromosomal evolution in recent teleosts is dominated by alternate loss of gene duplicates, and by intra-chromosomal rearrangements (~one per million years). These physical maps are a useful resource for comparative positional cloning of traits in cichlid fishes. The paired BAC end sequences from these clones will be an important resource for scaffolding forthcoming shotgun sequence assemblies of the tilapia genome. (Résumé d'auteur

DeWitt Wallace Library Annual Report 2017-2018

Summary of library and media services activities for 2017-201

Attributing the variability of eddy‐covariance CO 2 flux measurements across temporal scales using geostatistical regression for a mixed northern hardwood forest

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95220/1/gbc1702.pd