Design for Giving: Understanding What Motivates Corporate Philanthropy

What motivates corporate philanthropy? Since corporate giving is often fragmented, both in the sense of where grants originate within a company and where they are distributed, corporations typically lack a clear and comprehensive picture of their overall philanthropic expenditures and investments. In examining the giving patterns of corporations and other foundations, we have found that the vast majority of grants can be explained by three motivational clusters. Maximizing impact means managing the mix

The assessment of pre-morbid levels of intellectual functioning in people with dementia

This thesis consists of three papers: a literature review, an empirical paper and a reflective paper. The literature review considers the validity of measures of premorbid intellectual functioning with people with varying levels of dementia severity. It aims to be of use to British clinicians by focussing specially on tests that were designed for use with a British English speaking population. No single measure of pre-morbid intellectual functioning is found to be valid for use with people of all levels of dementia severity. The use of multiple measures for estimating pre-morbid intellectual functioning are indicated. The empirical paper investigates the relationship between a person’s pre-morbid level of intellectual functioning and the amount of cognitive decline that they experience prior to gaining a diagnosis of dementia. It uses a retrospective correlational design to analyse data from existing memory clinic files. A significant positive Pearson’s correlation coefficient is found between pre-morbid intellectual functioning and amount of cognitive decline at the point of diagnosis, in all three of the diagnostic groups. This suggests that people with high pre-morbid functioning have to undergo greater cognitive decline before they are given a diagnosis of dementia. Changes to current clinical practice are indicated which take account of relative amounts of cognitive decline in the diagnostic process. Finally, a reflective account is presented which is based on the author’s thoughts and experiences of carrying out research in the field of dementia. This focuses on the challenges in accessing retrospective clinical data. Suggestions are made regarding future research and clinical practice

Progress Toward Demonstrating a High Performance Optical Tape Recording Technology

This paper discusses the technology developments achieved during the first year of a program to develop a high performance digital optical tape recording device using a solid state, diode pumped, frequency doubled green laser source. The goal is to demonstrate, within two years, useful read/write data transfer rates to at least 100 megabytes per second and a user capacity of up to one terabyte per cartridge implemented in a system using a '3480' style mono-reel tape cartridge

Strengthening Community Foundations - Redefining the Opportunities

Commissioned by the Council on Foundations and released in October 2003, this white paper details the findings and the implications of our study of costs and revenues at nine community foundations. Offering a new perspective for community foundation sustainability, the white paper proposes that community foundations examine their strategy and operations on a product-by-product basis, taking into account their mission-driven priorities, internal costs, customer preferences and the competing donor alternatives for each type of product or service they offer

HypTrails: A Bayesian Approach for Comparing Hypotheses About Human Trails on the Web

When users interact with the Web today, they leave sequential digital trails on a massive scale. Examples of such human trails include Web navigation, sequences of online restaurant reviews, or online music play lists. Understanding the factors that drive the production of these trails can be useful for e.g., improving underlying network structures, predicting user clicks or enhancing recommendations. In this work, we present a general approach called HypTrails for comparing a set of hypotheses about human trails on the Web, where hypotheses represent beliefs about transitions between states. Our approach utilizes Markov chain models with Bayesian inference. The main idea is to incorporate hypotheses as informative Dirichlet priors and to leverage the sensitivity of Bayes factors on the prior for comparing hypotheses with each other. For eliciting Dirichlet priors from hypotheses, we present an adaption of the so-called (trial) roulette method. We demonstrate the general mechanics and applicability of HypTrails by performing experiments with (i) synthetic trails for which we control the mechanisms that have produced them and (ii) empirical trails stemming from different domains including website navigation, business reviews and online music played. Our work expands the repertoire of methods available for studying human trails on the Web.Comment: Published in the proceedings of WWW'1