Writing Intensive in the Major: Literature

The goal of this course is for students within the major of Literature to study the kind of academic writing that happens in the field through investigation of various scholarly journals, articles within those journals, the kinds of motivating questions authors in the field work from, rhetorical moves specific to the field, and the like. Students will begin by looking at and rhetorically analyzing published work so that they may consider what it means to actively participate in scholarly conversations through writing. This is a Composition course, so the content of the course uses Composition theory and practices as a means for students to develop conceptual and theoretical knowledge about scholarly writing that happens in the “real world.

Do You Need a New Donor Management System? A Step-by-step Decision Making Workbook

Workbook provides guidance when considering a switch to a new donor management system. Worksheets and questionnaires help you assess your needs, compare them with what you have, and pinpoint the benefits and costs of migrating to a new system. Includes resources for more information

The Reality of Measuring Human Service Programs: Results of a Survey

In the summer of 2013, Idealware created and distributed a survey to learn how human service organizations from their own mailing list are actually using technology to measure and evaluate the outcomes of their programs. The suvey looked at a general overview of outcomes measurement and program evaluation topics, from how frequently they look at data and how much time they spend doing so to what types of metrics the organizations were tracking. To further understand the realities of measuring program effectiveness, Idealware conducted a site visit and interview of three human service organizations in Portland, Maine. The results clearly show that the respondents are struggling to measure their programs

Ideas and the Politics of School Choice Policy: Portfolio Management in Philadelphia

In this article, we examine the role of ideas in the politics of school choice policy. We situate our study within scholarship that understands frames and logics as types of ideas that operate in the foreground and background of policy debates. We focus on portfolio management, a model of reform in which a central office oversees a network of schools functioning under varying forms of governance. Our data are drawn from a case study of political contention over portfolio management reform in Philadelphia. We find that the frames and counterframes deployed by stakeholders are resonant with societal-level logics of community localism, market transaction, and state bureaucratic administration. Much scholarship on education reform efforts focuses on their effectiveness and sustainability; our study addresses sociological processes involved and demonstrates how ideational processes shape political contention in education reform. We challenge the notion that opponents of portfolio reform are merely defenders of the status quo, and demonstrate the ways in which portfolio opponents critique and seek to change existing conditions

Basin bifurcations, oscillatory instability and rate-induced thresholds for AMOC in a global oceanic box model

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) transports substantial amounts of heat into the North Atlantic sector, and hence is of very high importance in regional climate projections. The AMOC has been observed to show multi-stability across a range of models of different complexity. The simplest models find a bifurcation associated with the AMOC `on' state losing stability that is a saddle node. Here we study a physically derived global oceanic model of Wood {\em et al} with five boxes, that is calibrated to runs of the FAMOUS coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model. We find the loss of stability of the `on' state is due to a subcritical Hopf for parameters from both pre-industrial and doubled CO${}_2$ atmospheres. This loss of stability via subcritical Hopf bifurcation has important consequences for the behaviour of the basin of attraction close to bifurcation. We consider various time-dependent profiles of freshwater forcing to the system, and find that rate-induced thresholds for tipping can appear, even for perturbations that do not cross the bifurcation. Understanding how such state transitions occur is important in determining allowable safe climate change mitigation pathways to avoid collapse of the AMOC.Comment: 18 figure

Streamlining Online Grant Applications: A Review of Vendors

In this report different vendors are evaluated against Project Streamline's Essential and Gold Standard features for online applications and reporting

A California Without Rodenticides: Challenges for Commensal Rodent Management in the Future

Rodenticides are an essential tool in the integrated pest management of infestations of commensal rodents (Rattus norvegicus, R. rattus, and Mus musculus). With the introduction of Assembly Bill 1788, the California Ecosystems Protection Act of 2019, California is potentially facing a future with new restrictions on the use of anticoagulant rodenticides to manage commensal rodents in urban areas. Assembly Bill 1788 has been proposed specifically to protect predators from anticoagulant rodenticide poisoning and seeks to restrict the application of second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGARs) for use in many urban and non-urban areas of California, USA. Exclusion and cultural practices, such as landscape management and sanitation (i.e., cleaning of property including but not limited to trash containment and removal, and drain sanitation), remain important and successful tools for managing rodent populations. However, increased exposure of wildlife to anticoagulant rodenticides has been detected California. Several animal species have been documented as having succumbed to rodenticide toxicosis. When rodents are killed by SGARs and consumed by predators, SGAR residues have been detected in the livers of predatory species. However, the effects of chronic, sublethal exposure to predators are not well understood. We discuss the current and proposed changes to rodenticide legislation in California, impacts of rodenticide to wildlife, and the potential effects of restrictions on wildlife. We discuss limitations to rodent management programs that have historically replied on the use of SGARs and the potential impacts of the proposed legislation on communities across California. We also identify research gaps that are impeding the adoption of evidence-based best management strategies for rodent control. To improve the success of commensal rodent control programs in California, more research is needed to develop effective strategies for rodent management

Crowding-induced hybridization of single DNA hairpins

It is clear that a crowded environment influences the structure, dynamics, and interactions of biological molecules, but the complexity of this phenomenon demands the development of new experimental and theoretical approaches. Here we use two complementary single-molecule FRET techniques to show that the kinetics of DNA base pairing and unpairing, which are fundamental to both the biological role of DNA and its technological applications, are strongly modulated by a crowded environment. We directly observed single DNA hairpins, which are excellent model systems for studying hybridization, either freely diffusing in solution or immobilized on a surface under crowding conditions. The hairpins followed two-state folding dynamics with a closing rate increasing by 4-fold and the opening rate decreasing 2-fold, for only modest concentrations of crowder [10% (w/w) polyethylene glycol (PEG)]. These experiments serve both to unambiguously highlight the impact of a crowded environment on a fundamental biological process, DNA base pairing, and to illustrate the benefits of single-molecule approaches to probing the structure and dynamics of complex biomolecular systems