Mapping Cultural Participation in Chicago

Charts the household income, educational level, race, and ethnicity of all neighborhoods in Chicago's metropolitan area and explores whether smaller, ethnic, and diverse organizations reach a different audience than the larger institutions

It’s About Time: Gaining Insights from Turnaround Time Metrics

Rutgers University is a R1 Research Institution with $929M in Sponsored Research funding in FY 2023 and$747M in Research Expenditures in 2022 as per the HERD survey. Since forming in 2019, the Data, Analytics and Business Intelligence team within the Office for Research has grown to three members, all with the mission of providing accurate and timely data about the Rutgers research enterprise for both internal leadership and decision makers across the university. The Office for Research leadership was receiving complaints from the field about sponsored research awards taking too long to be set up. The Data, Analytics and Business Intelligence team was tasked to find out: 1. Is this a common issue? 2. Is this a localized issue? 3. What’s causing this? Our team determined that by calculating the start and end of processes, and by categorizing responsible party within those processes, we can figure out what an average user might experience and then dig deeper into the outliers. We involved IT to extract the data from the award set up system into the data warehouse, and ultimately a Tableau data source. We also met with the business team to better understand the data in their system and define how their processes should be categorized, and if any of their processes might need to change to help generate important data. The final deliverable was a published Tableau Dashboard that leadership and the business unit could access that shows turnaround time trends broken down in various ways, with the option to drill down into outliers without leaving the dashboard. Since then, we’ve been able to replicate this method across other Office for Research business units including the teams managing IRB and IACUC protocols. Our presentation would include: 1. The problem that was presented to us 2. The process we followed 3. Samples of the dashboards we created 4. The outcome and lessons learned 5. Guiding questions on how other schools can use this method and replicate it across multiple systems within their Research Office

PHOENIX: Public Health and Obesity in England – the New Infrastructure eXamined First interim report: the scoping review

The PHOENIX project aims to examine the impact of structural changes to the health and care system in England on the functioning of the public health system, and on the approaches taken to improving the public’s health. The scoping review has now been completed. During this phase we analysed: Department of Health policy documents (2010-2013), as well as responses to those documents from a range of stakeholders; data from 22 semi-structured interviews with key informants; and the oral and written evidence presented at the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee on the role of local authorities in health issues. We also gathered data from local authority (LA) and Health and Wellbeing Board (HWB) websites and other sources to start to develop a picture of how the new structures are developing, and to collate demographic and other data on local authorities. A number of important themes were identified and explored during this phase. In summary, some key points related to three themes - governance, relationships and new ways of working - were: The reforms have had a profound effect on leadership within the public health system. Whilst LAs are now the local leaders for public health, in a more fragmented system, leadership for public health appears to be more dispersed amongst a range of organisations and a range of people within the LA. At national level, the leadership role is complex and not yet developed (from a local perspective). Accountability mechanisms have changed dramatically within public health, and many people still seem to be unclear about them. Some performance management mechanisms have disappeared, and much accountability now appears to rely on transparency and the democratic accountability that this would (theoretically) enable. The extent to which ‘system leaders’ within PHE are able to influence local decisions and performance will depend on the strength of relationships principally between the LA and the local Public Health England centre. These relationships will take time to develop. Many people have faced new ways of working, in new settings, and with new relationships to build. Public health teams in LAs have faced the most profound of these changes, having gone from a position of ‘expert voice’ to a position where they must defend their opinions and activities in the context of competing demands and severely restricted resources. Public health staff may require new skills, and may need to seek new ‘allies’ to thrive in the new environment. HWBs could be crucial in bringing together a fragmented system and dispersed leadership. The next phase of data collection will begin in March with the initiation of case study work. National surveys will be conducted in June/July this year (2014), and at the same time the following year. In this work, we will further explore the following themes: relationships, governance, decision making, new ways of working, and opportunities and difficulties

Design and analysis of laboratory experiments on aquatic plant litter decomposition

Microcosm studies are a useful tool when it comes to studying leaf litter decomposition but designing and analysing them can be a tricky path with many pitfalls. Because there is a plethora of drivers of leaf decomposition, it is important to be precise about the scientific questions that can be addressed with microcosm set-ups, and to use experimental designs that have minimal logistic implications but, at the same time, high statistical power. In this chapter, we first set the scene by introducing a hypothetical study that has the aim to estimate how leaf decomposition is driven by different decomposers and abiotic conditions. Following on from this scenario, we give an overview of the main biotic and abiotic drivers of leaf decomposition that will play a role in laboratory settings (with special attention to consumer species identity, species richness, body size and metabolic capacity, and also temperature, time scales and stressors). We then explain how to design and analyse laboratory experiments on aquatic leaf litter decomposition including the mathematics for calculating the metabolic power of leaf decomposers and some statistical models. Further three case studies are given—highly controlled experiments that can be analysed by analysis of variance.PostprintPeer reviewe

Vanguard, Vol. 2, issue 1

https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/vanguard/1001/thumbnail.jp

Vanguard, Vol. 2, issue 4

https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/vanguard/1003/thumbnail.jp