Finding Australia’s social enterprise sector: final report

Executive Summary Social enterprises are organisations that: Are led by an economic, social, cultural, or environmental mission consistent with a public or community benefit; Trade to fulfil their mission; Derive a substantial portion of their income from trade; and Reinvest the majority of their profit/surplus in the fulfilment of their mission. This document reports on the research findings of the Finding Australia’s Social Enterprise Sector (FASES) project. FASES is a joint initiative of Social Traders and the Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies, Queensland University of Technology. It is a first attempt to identify the range and scope of social enterprises in Australia. The methodology utilised in this research included: a review of existing literature and methods of social enterprise mapping; establishment of a project website and preliminary discussion paper to stimulate public engagement with defining and identifying Australian social enterprises, which resulted in four online responses to the discussion paper and 157 nominations of social enterprises to be included in the research; a series of workshops and interviews with 34 key informants to assist in defining social enterprise for the purposes of the research; identification of the social enterprise population through a combination of web and media review, review of existing databases and feedback through the project website; development and administration of an online survey; and collation and analysis of secondary data. Five hundred and thirty-nine organisations commenced the online survey, of which 365 were valid social enterprises according to our definition. Based on pre-existing research data and information from our survey, we estimate that there are up to 20 000 Australian social enterprises. This estimate takes into account that some not for profit organisations have multiple business ventures, and that not all social enterprises are incorporated as not for profits. Our survey results suggest that the Australian social enterprise sector is mature, sustainable and internally diverse with regard to mission and organisational structure. Amongst the 365 survey respondents, 73% had been operational for at least five years, and 62% were at least 10 years old. Australian social enterprises seek to fulfil a diversity of missions and serve a wide variety of beneficiaries. As a whole, the dominant foci of our survey respondents were on creating opportunities for people to participate in their community, and on finding new solutions to social, environmental, cultural and economic problems. Australian social enterprises operate in every industry of our economy. Our survey data suggest that they trade predominantly in local and regional markets and focus on fulfilling their missions at local and regional goals. However, some social enterprises operate in international markets and seek to respond to missions of international scope

Matt O\u27Keefe to Lead Center for Manufacturing Excellence

Expanded undergraduate program, new graduate program among goals for new executive directo

Matt O\u27Keefe to Head UM Center for Manufacturing Excellence

Veteran administrator assumes duties in January, envisions growth and expansio

Two Soybean Aphid Field Resources Now Available

Knowing how to manage and speed scout soybean aphids, just got easier, thanks to two new pocket-sized publications authored by Iowa State University Extension entomologists Marlin Rice and Matt O\u27Neal. The companion soybean aphid publications are right off the press and available from ISU Extension. One is a spiral-bound Soybean Aphid Management field guide for 2008, extension publication number CSI 11. The 43-page pocket guide is focused on management of soybean aphid in Iowa. The guide is a handy reference to the history, identification, development and management strategies for this relatively new insect pest for Iowa

Kinetic energy release in electron-induced decay reactions of molecular ions: C3H8+ and C3H7+

We have measured the kinetic energy release (KER) distributions for electron-induced dissociation of mass-selected molecular parent and fragment ions of propane. They are compared with distributions determined for spontaneous (metastable) dissociation. The average KER for induced dissociation of C3H8+ into C3H7+ is 13.2 +/- 1.2 meV, about 42% larger than for the spontaneous reaction. This large difference is attributed to the dramatically reduced time at which the induced reaction can be sampled. In contrast, the KER for dissociation of C3H7+ into C3H5+, which is characterized by a large reverse activation energy, is hardly affected by the experimental time scale. (C) 2000 American Institute of Physics. [S0021-9606(00)00826-6]

Numerical simulation of the thermal fragmentation process in fullerene C60

The processes of defect formation and annealing in fullerene C60 at T=(4000-6000)K are studied by the molecular dynamics technique with a tight-binding potential. The cluster lifetime until fragmentation due to the loss of a C2 dimer has been calculated as a function of temperature. The activation energy and the frequency factor in the Arrhenius equation for the fragmentation rate have been found to be Ea = (9.2 +- 0.4) eV and A = (8 +- 1)10^{19} 1/s. It is shown that fragmentation can occur after the C60 cluster loses its spherical shape. This fact must be taken into account in theoretical calculations of Ea.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

High resolution measurements of kinetic energy release distributions of neon, argon, and krypton cluster ions using a three sector field mass spectrometer

Using a newly constructed three sector field mass spectrometer (resulting in a BE1E2 field configuration) we have measured the kinetic energy release distributions of neon, argon, and krypton cluster ions. In the present study we used the first two sectors, B and E1, constituting a high resolution mass spectrometer, to select the parent ions in terms of mass, charge, and energy, and studied the decay of those ions in the third field free region. Due to the improved mass resolution we were able to extend earlier studies carried out with a two sector field machine, where an upper size limit arose from the fact that several isotopomers contribute to a decaying parent ion beam when the cluster size exceeds a certain value. Furthermore we developed a new data analysis. It allows us to model also fragment ion peaks that are a superposition of different decay reactions and thus we can determine the average kinetic energy release for all decay reactions of a given cluster ion. In a further step we used these results to determine the binding energies of cluster ions Rg(n) (ngreater than or equal to10) by applying finite heat bath theory. The smaller sizes have not been included in this analysis, because the validity of finite heat bath theory becomes questionable below napproximate to10. The present average kinetic energy releases and binding energies are compared with other experiments and various calculations. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics

Dirac electrons and domain walls: a realization in junctions of ferromagnets and topological insulators

We study a system of Dirac electrons with finite density of charge carriers coupled to an external electromagnetic field in two spatial dimensions, with a domain wall (DW) mass term. The interface between a thin-film ferromagnet and a three-dimensional topological insulator provides a condensed-matter realization of this model, when an out-of-plane domain wall magnetization is coupled to the TI surface states. We show how, for films with very weak intrinsic in-plane anisotropies, the torque generated by the edge electronic current flowing along the DW competes with an effective in-plane anisotropy energy, induced by quantum fluctuations of the chiral electrons bound to the wall, in a mission to drive the internal angle of the DW from a Bloch configuration towards a N\'eel configuration. Both the edge current and the induced anisotropy contribute to stabilize the internal angle, so that for weak intrinsic in-plane anisotropies DW motion is still possible without suffering from an extremely early Walker breakdown.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure