Philanthropy in the News

Over the last two decades, the quantity of news coverage of foundations has gradually risen, but its quality remains highly superficial, according to this report by Philanthropy Awareness Initiative and University of Minnesota professor David Fan. In fact, nearly 99% of more than 40,000 stories since 1990 have been transactional in their content -- focused on grants made and dollars out the door, not on benefits achieved

Calculating the Social Cost of Carbon

The paper1 discusses the determination of the social cost of carbon (SCC) using the PAGE2002 model used in the Stern Review. The SCC depends sensitively on assumptions about future economic development, the range and likelihood of economic and social damage arising from climate change at future dates and the discount rate to apply to that damage. The paper critically examines the choice of pure time preference and the weight to place on damage experienced by other countries in the distant future. Key conclusions are that the SCC rises at about 2.4% p.a. and the range of plausible estimates for the SCC is wide. The SCC is sensitive to a number of factors, significantly the equilibrium temperature rise for a doubling of CO2 concentration, the pure rate of time preference, the non-economic impact, the inequality weighting parameter and the half-life of global warming. Within the model the SCC appears surprisingly insensitive to the emissions scenario for reasons that are explained. The paper points out that methane and SF6 are also powerful GHGs whose impact can be estimated within the model

What the loud “No” in the Greek referendum means for the Eurozone

In the late hours of Sunday evening, it was confirmed that the ‘No’ camp had won an unexpectedly resounding victory in the Greek referendum—by 61% to 39% the Greek people had chosen to reject the terms of the most recent bailout proposal from their creditors (the ECB, the EU and the IMF). When Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister and leader of the radical left party Syriza, addressed his people following the result, he claimed it as a “victory of democracy”. Here, David Hope discusses the referendum, and why democracy may actually make it harder to strike a deal to keep Greece in the Eurozone

UoS: a graph-based system for graded word sense induction

This paper presents UoS, a graph-based Word Sense Induction system which attempts to find all applicable senses of a target word given its context, grading each sense according to its suitability to the context. Senses of a target word are induced through use of a non-parameterised, linear-time clustering algorithm that returns maximal quasi-strongly connected components of a target word graph in which vertex pairs are assigned to the same cluster if either vertex has the highest edge weight to the other. UoS participated in SemEval-2013 Task 13: Word Sense Induction for Graded and Non-Graded Senses. Two system were submitted; both systems returned results comparable with those of the best performing systems

Cultural Diversity Professional Development for Teachers: A Research Brief

Many regions of the United States have experienced rapid shifts in the racial and ethnic makeup of the population over the past decade. As a result, many of the nation’s schools have undergone significant changes in student demographics. This includes growth in the numbers of Asian, Hispanic, and multi-racial students.1 Regionally, enrollment data reflect this demographic change (figure 1). It is also worth noting that these demographic changes are more dramatic in some schools and communities than others. Aggregate data for the region shows the largest growth in the population of Hispanic students, which increased from 2.98% of the population in the 2003- 04 school year to 10.23% in the 2015-16 school year. This demographic shift has increased the cultural and language diversity of our schools

Evaluation of Modification of the Upper Batavia Dam on the Fox River, Illinois

Progress Report, Federal Aid Project F-136-R Segment 6Report issued on: August 2004Submitted to Office of Water Resources, Illinois Department of Natural Resource

Labour market institutions still matter in the knowledge economy

The last forty years have seen a pervasive rise in income inequality across the advanced democracies of Western Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region

Labour market institutions still matter for workforce equality in the knowledge economy

The latter decades of the 20th century saw the rise of the so called 'knowledge economy' in Europe, with service sectors such as finance and telecommunications coming to dominate national economies. But these changes also occurred alongside a growth in income inequality across advanced democracies. As David Hope and Angelo Martelli highlight, many observers have assumed that the transition to the knowledge economy has weakened the ability of labour market institutions, such as coordinated wage setting and employment protection legislation, to combat inequality. However, drawing on a new study, they illustrate that labour market institutions still retain the capacity to shelter workers from structural changes in the economy, including the continued shift of workers into high-value added service sectors

Vibronic interactions in the visible and near-infrared spectra of C60− anions

Electron-phonon coupling is an important factor in understanding many properties of the C60 fullerides. However, there has been little success in quantifying the strength of the vibronic coupling in C60 ions, with considerable disagreement between experimental and theoretical results. We will show that neglect of quadratic coupling in previous models for C60- ions results in a significant overestimate of the linear coupling constants. Including quadratic coupling allows a coherent interpretation to be made of earlier experimental and theoretical results which at first sight are incompatible