What do Nonprofits Stand For? Renewing the Nonprofit Value Commitment

Nonprofit organizations are under assault today as perhaps never before, with consequences that could be profound for the future of these organizations and for those they serve. Proposals to cap the federal tax deduction for charitable contributions have become an increasingly common feature of budget-balancing measures from both ends of the political spectrum; a growing number of state and local governments have imposed new taxes and other fees on nonprofits, and shifts in government payment methods that advantage forprofit businesses have led to a significant loss of market share for nonprofits in a number of traditional nonprofit fields of activity.This report grows out of a first step toward meeting this challenge: to see whether there is a meaningful degree of consensus about the distinctive values of the nonprofit sector among a significant portion of the sector's organizations. More than that, the work on which this report is based also sought to explore two other matters: first, how well nonprofit organizations feel they actually embody the values they profess; and second, how successful they feel the sector has been in conveying these values to key stakeholders and supporters.To shed light on these matters, the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Listening Post Project surveyed the 1,500 nonprofit organizations in the three core fields of human services, community development, and the arts that have agreed to serve as the Project's eyes and ears on major developments affecting the nonprofit sector across the country. The results reflect the responses of 731 organizations -- enough to provide a statistically significant sample of nonprofit organizations of various sizes, and of nonprofit activity, in these fields.While we do not claim these results are representative of the nonprofit sector as a whole (hospitals and higher education, for example, are not included), we do believe they are representative of both the total number of organizations and the lion's share of the nonprofit activity in these three core fields, which embrace a significant portion of all nonprofit organizations

Communiqué No. 19: Recession Pressures on Nonprofit Jobs

Summarizes findings from a national survey on nonprofit employment that was conducted in April 2010. The report describes evidence of workforce strain during the current recession with increased demand for services. Nonprofit have also demonstrated resilience in maintaining staffing levels

Introduction to the Special Issue: Genome-Wide Association Studies

Introduction to the Special Issue: Genome-Wide Association StudiesComment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-STS310 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Communiqué No. 16: Escalating Pension Benefit Costs -- Another Threat to Nonprofit Survival?

Provides findings from a national survey of nonprofits that examines the benefits of nonprofit retirement programs, explores the financial stress the plans are under, and describes the coping strategies developed by organizations

Communiqué No. 15: Health Care and Nonprofits: The Hidden Dimension of America's Health Care Crisis

Providings findings from a national survey that examines how nonprofits and their employees are affected by rising health care costs

The creeping motion of a spherical particle normal to a deformable interface

Numerical results are presented for the approach of a rigid sphere normal to a deformable fluid-fluid interface in the velocity range for which inertial effects may be neglected. Both the case of a sphere moving with constant velocity, and that of a sphere moving under the action of a constant non-hydrodynamic body force are considered for several values of the viscosity ratio, density difference and interfacial tension between the two fluids. Two distinct modes of interface deformation are demonstrated: a film drainage mode in which fluid drains away in front of the sphere leaving an ever-thinning film, and a tailing mode where the sphere passes several radii beyond the plane of the initially undeformed interface, while remaining encapsulated by the original surrounding fluid which is connected with its main body by a thin thread-like tail behind the sphere. We consider the influence of the viscosity ratio, density difference, interfacial tension and starting position of the sphere in deter-mining which of these two modes of deformation will occur

An excess of damped Lyman alpha galaxies near QSOs

We present a sample of 33 damped Lyman alpha systems (DLAs) discovered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) whose absorption redshifts (z_abs) are within 6000 km/s of the QSO's systemic redshift (z_sys). Our sample is based on 731 2.5 < z_sys < 4.5 non-broad-absorption-line (non-BAL) QSOs from Data Release 3 (DR3) of the SDSS. We estimate that our search is ~100 % complete for absorbers with N(HI) >= 2e20 cm^-2. The derived number density of DLAs per unit redshift, n(z), within v < 6000 km/s is higher (3.5 sigma significance) by almost a factor of 2 than that of intervening absorbers observed in the SDSS DR3, i.e. there is evidence for an overdensity of galaxies near the QSOs. This provides a physical motivation for excluding DLAs at small velocity separations in surveys of intervening 'field' DLAs. In addition, we find that the overdensity of proximate DLAs is independent of the radio-loudness of the QSO, consistent with the environments of radio-loud and radio-quiet QSOs being similar.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS (13 pages, 6 figures

In the Aftermath of the Terri Schiavo Case: Resolving End-of-Life Disputes Through Alternative Dispute Resolution

Imagine yourself the proud parent of an adult daughter. You have spent many years nurturing your precious child so that she may excel in the world. Just as all of your dreams for her are coming true, the news no parent wants to hear was delivered. Your daughter lost control of her car, the vehicle overturned and she was found lying face down in a ditch. You gasped. You expected the worst. A tragic end to a life yet lived. Then, the good news was delivered. You breathed a sigh of relief. You learned she survived. She was in a coma, but nonetheless, she survived. Although she remained in a coma for three weeks, her condition eventually progressed to an unconscious state where she was able to orally ingest nutrition. In order to further recovery, a gastrostomy feeding and hydration tube was implanted by surgeons. Despite hopes for a recovery, these rehabilitative efforts proved unavailing and she currently remains in a persistent vegetative state. Now the good news of her survival seems bittersweet. An end-of-life decision, for your daughter, your flesh and blood, is now in your hands. What should be done? Who should decide