Measuring Impact: Advocacy Evaluation & Capacity Building

Developing up-front organizational advocacy capacity is important in the evaluation process. An organization should first assess its staff, knowledge, coalition partners and other resources to determine what may be needed for their upcoming advocacy efforts. For example, to protect social services in the upcoming state budget, it may be important for the organization to develop the knowledge and skills for a strong public relations campaign to ensure that voters and state legislators understand how proposed cuts will affect constituents. Nonprofits can also assess what it would take to develop a strong and flexible organization to achieve longer-term advocacy goals, such as efforts to obtain new policy

Social Work and Civic Engagement: The Political Participation of Professional Social Workers

This article examines the involvement of practicing social workers in one type of civic engagement: the use of political processes to promote the public good. Based on a survey of 1,274 randomly selected members of NASW, this is the largest study to date examining the involvement of social workers in political action and policy advocacy. Findings suggest that approximately half of social workers demonstrate high levels of participation in the policy process. The authors analyze the frequency with which respondents engage in specific political and policy-related activities, and compare these results to those of other studies. They also examine respondents\u27attitudes toward political participation and share recommendations for increasing this aspect of civic engagement within the profession

Amplifying Nonprofit Voices: Bridging the Advocacy Evaluation Gap

Over the past two decades, a robust field of advocacy and policy change evaluation has emerged. The field is now considering its future steps. Advocates, funders, and evaluators all play important roles, and all three have opportunities to realize significant improvements. To better understand advocates' perspectives and bridge the gap between their evaluation needs and the field of advocacy evaluation practice, this research surveyed U.S. nonprofit advocates about their advocacy practices and experiences with evaluation.This study offers recommendations on advocate-focused evaluation practices and aims. It updates and deepens our understanding of nonprofit advocates' capacity to evaluate their advocacy, and assesses their strategies and tactics. Recommendations include, for example, partnering with nonprofit advocates early on to identify evaluation gaps and resources that will result in tailored evaluation capacity building resources to meet advocates where they are

Magnetic source imaging of tactile evoked activity in the human secondary somatosensory cortex

In der vorliegenden Arbeit wurde die Antwort des menschlichen Gehirns auf taktile Fingerstimulation mittels Magnetoenzephalographie (MEG) untersucht. Zur Darstellung des zeitlichen Aktivitätsverlaufs im primären (SI) und sekundären (SII) somatosensorischen Kortex wurde räumlich-zeitliche Quellenmodellierung angewandt. Hauptuntersuchungsobjekt war SII. Zur Auswertung von Daten verschiedener Versuchspersonen wurde eine Kombination aus sequentiellem Dipol-Fit und dem Setzen von Quellen aus standardisierten Kernspinbildern entwickelt und in drei Studien angewandt. Zunächst wurden simultane Ableitungen von Elektroenzephalogramm (EEG) und MEG durchgeführt. Sie offenbarten die Existenz zweier Aktivitätsgeneratoren im SII-Areal. Aufgrund der geringeren Durchsetzung mit Hintergrundaktivität erwies sich das MEG im Vergleich zum EEG als das geeignetere Mittel zur Abbildung von SII-Aktivität. In einer zweiten Studie wurde gezeigt, dass das Richten der Aufmerksamkeit auf den Reizort bzw. die Reizintensität die P80m-Komponente im MEG um 52% bzw. 64% erhöht. Dieser Effekt wurde zum Teil durch eine Verlangsamung der Amplitudenabnahme mit zunehmender Stimulationsdauer hervorgerufen. Eine dritte Studie zur Verarbeitung simultaner Reize zweier Finger ergab signifikante suppressive Interaktion der Reize in SII sowohl bei Stimulation von Fingern einer Hand als auch beider Hände. Während bilateraler Stimulation schienen sich beide Hemisphären auf die Verarbeitung des contralateralen Reizes zu spezialisieren und den ipsilateralen Stimulus zu unterdrücken

Ictal high‐frequency oscillations at 80–200 Hz coupled with delta phase in epileptic spasms

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/88095/1/j.1528-1167.2011.03263.x.pd

SARS-CoV-2 Proteome-Wide Analysis Revealed Significant Epitope Signatures in COVID-19 Patients

The WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. The causative agent of this acute respiratory disease is a newly emerged coronavirus, named SARS-CoV-2, which originated in China in late 2019. Exposure to SARS-CoV-2 leads to multifaceted disease outcomes from asymptomatic infection to severe pneumonia, acute respiratory distress and potentially death. Understanding the host immune response is crucial for the development of interventional strategies. Humoral responses play an important role in defending viral infections and are therefore of particular interest. With the aim to resolve SARS-CoV-2-specific humoral immune responses at the epitope level, we screened clinically well-characterized sera from COVID-19 patients with mild and severe disease outcome using high-density peptide microarrays covering the entire proteome of SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, we determined the longevity of epitope-specific antibody responses in a longitudinal approach. Here we present IgG and IgA-specific epitope signatures from COVID-19 patients, which may serve as discriminating prognostic or predictive markers for disease outcome and/or could be relevant for intervention strategies

Manual dexterity: functional lateralisation patterns and motor efficiency

Manual tasks are an important goal-directed ability. In this EEG work, we studied how handedness affects the hemispheric lateralisation patterns during performance of visually-driven movements with either hand. The neural correlates were assessed by means of EEG coherence whereas behavioural output was measured by motor error. The EEG data indicated that left- and right-handers showed distinct recruitment patterns. These involved local interactions between brain regions as well as more widespread associations between brain systems. Despite these differences, brain-behaviour correlations highlighted that motor efficiency depended on left-sided brain regions across groups. These results suggest that skilled hand motor control relies on different neural patterns as a function of handedness whereas behavioural efficiency is linked with the left hemisphere. In conclusion, the present findings add to our understanding about principles of lateralised organisation as a function of handedness

Lacunarity of the Spatial Distributions of Soil Types in Europe.

Lacunarity as a means of quantifying textural properties of spatial distributions suggests a classification into three main classes of the most abundant soils that cover 92% of Europe. Soils with a well-defined self-similar structure of the linear class are related to widespread spatial patterns that are nondominant but ubiquitous at continental scale. Fractal techniques have been increasingly and successfully applied to identify and describe spatial patterns in natural sciences. However, objects with the same fractal dimension can show very different optical properties because of their spatial arrangement. This work focuses primary attention on the geometrical structure of the geographical patterns of soils in Europe. We made use of the European Soil Database to estimate lacunarity indexes of the most abundant soils that cover 92% of the surface of Europe and investigated textural properties of their spatial distribution. We observed three main classes corresponding to three different patterns that displayed the graphs of lacunarity functions, that is, linear, convex, and mixed. They correspond respectively to homogeneous or self-similar, heterogeneous or clustered and those in which behavior can change at different ranges of scales. Finally, we discuss the pedological implications of that classification