Building Capacity in Nonprofit Organizations

Offers a capacity building model that is based on a review of civil society, sustainable development, and organizational management literature. Reviews effective capacity building programs sponsored or operated by foundations. Includes recommendations

Who's Teaching the Teachers? Evidence from the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty and the Survey of Earned Doctorates

In light of a documented shortage of candidates for teacher education faculty positions, this study explores the academic labor market for teacher education faculty utilizing data from the National Survey on Postsecondary Faculty and the Survey of Earned Doctorates. The study sheds light on the factors that predict who becomes a faculty member in teacher education

From Disciplinarian to Change Agent: How the Civil Rights Era Changed the Roles of Student Affairs Professionals

Little has been written about the roles and functions of student affairs administrators during the civil rights era. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine how the civil rights era influenced the student affairs profession, paying particular attention to the roles played by student affairs administrators in relation to students, other administrators, and the community. A secondary analysis was conducted based on interviews with 18 student affairs professionals who served on a variety of college campuses during the civil rights era, primarily from the 1950s through the 1970s. Our findings suggest that these administrators took on roles such as educator, advocate, mediator, initiator, and change agent in order to effectively and efficiently resolve issues that arose on their campuses as a result of the civil rights era and the student protest movement. Colleges and universities have been the battleground for many important civil rights concerns, and many authors have chronicled student social movements of this era (Adelman, 1972; Altbach, 1973; Strauss & Howe, 1997). In both northern and southern colleges and universities, integration of African Americans into higher education was a slow and difficult process (Clark, 1993; Cohodas, 1997; Exum, 1985). Once on campus, African American students had to deal with segregation in all types of out-of-class domains including housing, cafeterias, social activities, organized student groups (including athletics, fraternities, and sororities), availability of scholarships, on-campus and off-campus jobs, and access to barber shops and beauty parlors. Student affairs administrators were in the middle of this battlefield and played a key role in representing student demands to the administration and sometimes advocating for change to occur (Clark, 1993; Laliberte, 2003; Tuttle, 1996). Simultaneously, the presidents of many college and university campuses expected the student affairs staff to represent the institutions’ views to the students and to mete out discipline to students who failed to follow the campus rules. These conflicting demands—the desire to support students and the desire to be seen as effective administrators—put many student affairs administrators in precarious positions (Nichols, 1990). Nevertheless, student affairs professionals in the civil rights era served as communication links between the administration and students and experienced enhanced status and advancement to higher administrative positions. In the process, their experiences exerted considerable influence on the student affairs profession itself. By examining the stories of student affairs administrators, we learn firsthand how the civil rights era affected the profession. This article provides a glimpse into civil rights struggles on campus as seen through their eyes. Unfortunately, little has been written about the roles and functions of student affairs administrators during the civil rights era. One study by Crookston and Atkyns (1974) found that during the period of unrest in the 1960s, many senior student affairs officers left their positions. They also concluded that during this period student affairs administrators became known as crisis managers, and most colleges and universities elevated the chief student affairs officer from dean to vice president. In recent research that examined student affairs during the turbulent years of 1968-1972, Laliberte (2003) 1 confirmed the crisis manager and student advocate roles of student affairs administrators. For the purpose of this article, a secondary analysis of the data collected for the book Reflecting Back, Looking Forward: Civil Rights and Student Affairs (Wolf-Wendel et al., 2004) was conducted to examine how the civil rights era influenced the student affairs profession, paying particular attention to the roles played by student affairs administrators in relation to students, other administrators, and the community. The book told the stories of individuals in first person narrative form; however, this article focuses specifically on how participation during the civil rights era affected the profession itself

Screening for Diabetes and Pre-Diabetes With Proposed A1C-Based Diagnostic Criteria

OBJECTIVE — An International Expert Committee (IEC) and the American Diabetes Asso-ciation (ADA) proposed diagnostic criteria for diabetes and pre-diabetes based on A1C levels. We hypothesized that screening for diabetes and pre-diabetes with A1C measurements would differ from using oral glucose tolerance tests (OGTT). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS — We compared pre-diabetes, dysglycemia (diabetes or pre-diabetes), and diabetes identified by the proposed criteria (A1C 6.5 % for diabetes and 6.0–6.4 % [IEC] or 5.7–6.4 % [ADA] for high risk/pre-diabetes) with standard OGTT diagnoses in three datasets. Non-Hispanic white or black adults without known diabetes who had A1C and 75-g OGTT measurements were included from the prospective Screening for Impaired Glucose Tolerance study (n 1,581), and from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) III (n 2014), and NHANES 2005–2006 (n 1,111). RESULTS — OGTTs revealed pre-diabetes in 35.8 % and diabetes in 5.2 % of combined study subjects. A1C provided receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve areas for diabetes of 0.79– 0.83, but ROC curve areas were 0.70 for dysglycemia or pre-diabetes. The proposed criteria missed 70 % of individuals with diabetes, 71–84 % with dysglycemia, and 82–94 % with pre

An Analysis of Private School Closings

We add to the small literature on private school supply by exploring exits of K-12 private schools. We find that the closure of private schools is not an infrequent event, and use national survey data from the National Center for Education Statistics to study closures of private schools. We assume that the probability of an exit is a function of excess supply of private schools over the demand, as well as the school's characteristics such as age, size, and religious affiliation. Our empirical results generally support the implications of the model. Working Paper 07-0

Benign Ancient Schwannoma of the abdominal wall: An unwanted birthday present

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>There has been a recent growth in the use of whole body Computerised Tomography (CT) scans in the private sector as a screening test for asymptomatic disease. This is despite scant evidence to show any positive effect on morbidity or mortality. There has been concern raised over the possible harms of the test in terms of radiation exposure as well as the risk and anxiety of further investigation and treatment for the large numbers of benign lesions identified.</p> <p>Case Presentation</p> <p>A healthy 64 year old lady received a privately funded whole body CT scan for her birthday which revealed an incidental mass in the right iliac fossa. This was investigated with further imaging and colonoscopy and as confident diagnosis could not be made, eventually excised. Histology demonstrated this to be a benign ancient schwannoma and we believe this to be the first reported case of an abdominal wall schwannoma in the English literature</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Ancient schwannomas are rare tumours of the peripheral nerve sheaths more usually found in the head, neck and flexor surfaces of extremities. They are a subtype of classical schwannomas with a predominance of degenerative changes. Our case highlights the pitfalls of such screening tests in demonstrating benign disease and subjecting patients to what turns out to be unnecessary invasive investigation and treatment. It provides evidence as to the consequences of the large number of false positive results that are created by blind CT scanning of asymptomatic patients i.e. its tendency to detect pseudodiesease rather than affect survival rates. Should the number of scans increase there may be an unnecessary burden on NHS resources due to the large numbers of benign lesions picked up, that are then referred for further investigation.</p

Demographic responses of Daphnia magna fed transgenic Bt-maize

The food/feed quality of a variety of genetically modified (GM) maize expressing Cry1Ab Bt-toxin was tested over the life-cycle of Daphnia magna, an arthropod commonly used as model organism in ecotoxicological studies. Demographic responses were compared between animals fed GM or unmodified (UM) near isogenic maize, with and without the addition of predator smell. Age-specific data on survival and birth rates were integrated and analysed using life tables and Leslie matrices. Survival, fecundity and population growth rate (PGR) data generally disfavoured transgenic Bt-maize as feed for D. magna compared to animals fed the unmodified (UM) near isogenic line of maize. Decomposition of age-specific effects revealed that the most important contributions to a reduced PGR in the GM-fed group came from both fecundity and survival differences early in life. We conclude that juvenile and young adult stages are the most sensitive experimental units and should be prioritized in future research. These stages are often omitted in toxicological/ecotoxicological studies and in feeding trials