Funding for voluntary sector infrastructure: a case study analysis

This paper outlines the policy context for grant-making to voluntary sector infrastructure organisations, and describes a qualitative research programme undertaken in the UK in which a detailed study of 20 such grants were investigated from multiple perspectives in terms of their perceived impact after the projects had finished. The grants were selected on tightly determined stratification criteria, from a large pool of grants for voluntary sector infrastructure work made by the Community Fund (one of the distributors of funds to “good causes” from the UK National Lottery). Particular emphasis was placed in the study on assessing the impact on other voluntary and community organisations likely to benefit from the support given to infrastructure organisations. The paper concludes that in general terms, grant-making for voluntary sector infrastructure is an effective way of supporting the voluntary and community sector more generally, although there are important lessons both for funders and for grant-recipients to improve the effectiveness of grant-making in this field

Accelerating Parallel Tempering: Quantile Tempering Algorithm (QuanTA)

Using MCMC to sample from a target distribution, $\pi(x)$ on a $d$-dimensional state space can be a difficult and computationally expensive problem. Particularly when the target exhibits multimodality, then the traditional methods can fail to explore the entire state space and this results in a bias sample output. Methods to overcome this issue include the parallel tempering algorithm which utilises an augmented state space approach to help the Markov chain traverse regions of low probability density and reach other modes. This method suffers from the curse of dimensionality which dramatically slows the transfer of mixing information from the auxiliary targets to the target of interest as $d \rightarrow \infty$. This paper introduces a novel prototype algorithm, QuanTA, that uses a Gaussian motivated transformation in an attempt to accelerate the mixing through the temperature schedule of a parallel tempering algorithm. This new algorithm is accompanied by a comprehensive theoretical analysis quantifying the improved efficiency and scalability of the approach; concluding that under weak regularity conditions the new approach gives accelerated mixing through the temperature schedule. Empirical evidence of the effectiveness of this new algorithm is illustrated on canonical examples

Mandatory public benefit reporting as a basis for charity accountability: findings from England & Wales

Charitable status is inherently linked in many jurisdictions with the requirement that an entity must be established for public benefit. But, until recently the public benefit principle had relatively little impact on the operations of most established charities. However, in England and Wales, reforms linked to the Charities Act 2006 led to a new requirement for public benefit reporting in the trustees’ annual report (TAR) of every registered charity. This new narrative reporting requirement had the potential to affect the understanding of accountability by charities. The paper investigates the impact of that requirement through a study of over 1400 sets of charity reports and account

Commentary on Robert Riley's article "A personal account of the discovery of hyperbolic structures on some knot complements"

We give some background and biographical commentary on the postumous article that appears in this [journal issue | ArXiv] by Robert Riley on his part of the early history of hyperbolic structures on some compact 3-manifolds. A complete list of Riley's publications appears at the end of the article.Comment: 5 page

Cross-Border Issues in the Regulation of Charities: Experiences from the UK and Ireland

Drawing on the specific experiences of the three authors across the jurisdictions of England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, this article outlines the new legal-regulatory framework for charities in each jurisdiction, providing an overview of their respective treatments of external charities (i.e. non-domestic charities operating in a host jurisdcition) before assessing the operational challenges posted by these regimes for such cross-border charities. It shows that the treatment of external charities across the four jurisdictions in not the product of a fully coordinated and coherent joint approach by the four sets of legislators. The article concludeds by offering some preliminary recommendations intended to address the burdens caused by these overlapping regulatory systems

Weight-Preserving Simulated Tempering

Simulated tempering is popular method of allowing MCMC algorithms to move between modes of a multimodal target density {\pi}. One problem with simulated tempering for multimodal targets is that the weights of the various modes change for different inverse-temperature values, sometimes dramatically so. In this paper, we provide a fix to overcome this problem, by adjusting the mode weights to be preserved (i.e., constant) over different inverse-temperature settings. We then apply simulated tempering algorithms to multimodal targets using our mode weight correction. We present simulations in which our weight-preserving algorithm mixes between modes much more successfully than traditional tempering algorithms. We also prove a diffusion limit for an version of our algorithm, which shows that under appropriate assumptions, our algorithm mixes in time O(d [log d]^2)