Double Bottom Line Progress Report: Assessing Social Impact in Double Bottom Line Ventures, Methods Catalog

Outlines methods for social entrepreneurs and their investors to define, measure and communicate social impact and return in early-stage ventures

Double Bottom Line Project Report: Assessing Social Impact in Double Bottom Line Ventures

This tool expresses costs and social impacts of an investment in monetary terms. Quantification is achieved according to one or more of three measures: NPV (the aggregate value of all costs, revenues and social impacts discounted), benefit-cost ratio (the discounted value of revenues and positive impacts divided by discounted value of costs and negative impacts) and internal rate of return (the net value of revenues plus impacts expressed as an annual percentage return on the total costs of the investment)

The Senior Year Transition

This research focuses on how college seniors emotionally and mentally experience their final year of college. The senior year experience should be a time of reflection and closure of their undergraduate experience. The students in this study identified how types of involvement led them to self-reflection and recognize individual strengths and outcomes that prepared them for their post-graduate lives. By capturing these students’ voices through their experiences the research examined the need for all-inclusive support during the senior year transition. The data provides implications for programming and services, with the intent to facilitate reflection and closure. Adviser: Debra Mulle

Cardiorespiratory Intensity Levels of Four Ballroom Dances

The objective of this research was to determine the cardiorespiratory intensity levels of four ballroom dances and to quantify work performance required to complete each dance. Participants were VU Ballroom team members who have competed in the bronze level or higher for at least one year. A total of 4 couples (n=8) completed a Queen’s College Step Test to calculate estimated maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max). Age-adjusted maximum target heart rates (HR) were calculated for each participant. Participants danced the American Tango, American Viennese Waltz, International Waltz, and International Quickstep while wearing First Beat heart rate monitors which captured each individual’s HR and recorded the HR per minute throughout each dance performance. Exercise HR data was uploaded to a computer with First Beat software for analysis. Data is in the process of analysis. The duration of elevated HR’s as a percentage of HRmax will be used to determine intensity levels and will be compared to levels of intensity of other athletic performances

Mapping the invisible hand: a body model of a phantom limb

After amputation, individuals often have vivid experiences of their absent limb (i.e., a phantom limb). Therefore, one’s conscious image of one’s body cannot depend on peripheral input only (Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1998). However, the origin of phantom sensations is hotly debated. Reports of vivid phantoms in the case of congenital absence of the limb show that memory of former body state is not necessary (Brugger et al., 2000). According to one view, phantoms may reflect innate organization of sensorimotor cortices (Melzack, 1990). Alternatively, phantoms could reflect generalization from viewing other people’s bodies (Brugger et al., 2000), a sensorimotor example of the classic theory that understanding oneself follows from understanding the “generalized other” (Mead, 1934, p. 154). Because phantom limbs cannot be stimulated, sensory testing cannot directly compare visual and somatosensory influences on representations of phantom limbs. Consequently, empirical investigation of phantoms is limited

Pediatric Pharyngeal IgD-positive Monoclonal Plasmacytoid and Plasma Cell Neoplasm

Pediatric neoplasm with monoclonal proliferation of lymphoplasmacytoid lymphocytes and plasma cells is exceedingly rare and has essentially never been reported in immunocompetent children. Here, we report a previously healthy 13-year-old girl with a pharyngeal mass and enlarged cervical lymph nodes. The pharyngeal mass was composed of CD138+, CD79a+, MUM-1+, IgD+, CD20−, PAX-5−, CD43−, λ-restricted monoclonal plasmacytoid, and plasma cells. Scattered CD20+, PAX-5+ B cells were present in the background. The patient was treated as localized non-Hodgkin lymphoma (stage II) with cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, and prednisone and is in complete remission at 17 months from the last chemotherapy

Optimal psycholinguistic environments for distance foreign langauge learning

Rational choices among the numerous technological options available for foreign language teaching need to be based, in part, on psycholinguistic considerations. Which technological advances help create an optimal psycholinguistic environment for language learning, and which may be innovative but relatively unhelpful? One potential source of guidance is offered by the ten methodological principles of Task-Based Language Teaching (Long, 1985, and elsewhere), each realizable by a variety of pedagogic procedures. Interest in TBLT derives from several sources, including its responsiveness to learners’ precisely specified communicative needs, the potential it offers for developing functional language proficiency without sacrificing grammatical accuracy, and its attempt to harmonize the way languages are taught with what SLA research has revealed about how they are learned. TBLT’s ten methodological principles are briefly defined and motivated, and illustrations provided of how the principles can inform choices among technological options in the particular case of distance education for the less commonly taught languages

A feminist dialogue with the camera: strategies of visibility in video art practices.

This is a practice–based PhD that seeks to contest limited and reductive tropes of female representation in a contemporary Western context. The focus of the thesis is on video art, which, I argue, can be both a radical tool for deconstructing dominant mainstream images of femininity and play a role in developing progressive re–presentations of female subjectivities. This thesis argues that there is a need to revisit feminist artworks from the 1970s and 1980s, the critical potential of which remains under–examined. Video as an artistic medium emerged during the late 1960s to 1980s over the same period that the women’s liberation movement gained momentum and achieved historic societal and legislative change in the West. Women artists used the medium of video as a means to contest the representational economy of traditional gender roles that placed a broad array of limitations upon women. The camera apparatus allowed women to control the production of their own image, articulate their subjective experiences and directly address the spectator. The re–imaging of female subjectivities progressed by feminist artists was, however, largely halted by the backlash against feminism in the 1990s. The issues raised by feminism, particularly in relation to female representation, therefore remain unresolved. This thesis argues that artistic strategies deployed by feminist artists in the 1970s and 1980s, underpinned by the radical principle ‘the personal is political’, which emerged in the 1970s, are still useful today. Through in depth analysis of selected video works from the 1970s onwards as well as reflection on my own art practice research, this thesis investigates how formal strategies employed by feminist artists can operate to undermine the status quo of hegemonic gender representations and to propose new potentialities of female subjectivities and gender identities

Characterizing and Modeling the Experience of Transfer Students in Engineering—Progress on NSF Award 0969474

Characterizing and Modeling the Experience of Transfer Students in Engineering— Progress on NSF Award 0969474Quantitative analysis of MIDFIELD databaseOur analysis used records for 94,732 undergraduate students from the Multiple-InstitutionDatabase for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELDcomprises a census of undergraduate students who attended 11 public institutions between 1988and 2008. MIDFIELD institutions represent public universities that educate large numbers ofengineering students.From the 977,950 records available, we restricted our sample to those who (1) were domesticstudents (927,350), (2) were in the data set early enough for us to observe the possibility ofgraduation within six years (677,691), and (3) declared a major in engineering or otherwiseexpressed the intent to study engineering in the fifth semester of their programs (94,732). Fortransfer students, we estimated placement using transfer hours, assuming that 15 credit hoursequals one semester; we also used the fifth semester as the reference point to capture mosttransfer students at the point of matriculation to ensure a valid comparison of transfers to non-transfers. This approach resulted in a sample of 21,542 transfer and 73,190 non-transferengineering students included in this analysis.Semi-structured interviewsCampus representatives at two MIDFIELD institutions sent an invitation to all engineeringstudents who had transferred into the institution in the two semesters preceding the semester ofthe interview. Interested students completed a survey to provide demographic and schedulinginformation. Participants were chosen from six engineering majors - civil, chemical, computer,electrical, industrial, and mechanical - and were diverse with respect to gender and ethnicity.Selected students were interviewed in Fall 2011 and in Spring 2012.We used a semi-structured interview protocol to learn more about student experiences with thetransfer process. We used a constant comparative coding method, whereby emerging conceptswere constantly compared to data that had already been coded.Overview of Progress Identifying and Describing the Entry Points into Engineering Transfer Pathways: A preliminary study relied on 52 of the 86 students who were interviewed across five campuses to understand their reasons for choosing engineering as a field of studies and the transfer pathway to enter the field. Studying the Motivations and Experiences of Older Transfer Students in Engineering: Of the 86 students who were interviewed on the five campuses, the 15 students who were 25 years of age or older at the time of the interview were selected for this study. Studying the Performance of Black transfer students: based on a logistic regression model refined to include transfer pathway (2-year vs. 4-year), we learned that: Studying the Mean Grade Differential by Course Discipline: For engineering transfer and first-time-in-college (FTIC) students, we computed average grades in STEM courses by discipline, and by institution