Winning Strategies: Best Practices in Home-Ownership Promotion

The NeighborWorks Campaign for Home Ownership 2002, in creating a framework for expanding NeighborWorks organizations' work with first-time homeowners, has also had the positive outcome of pooling the collective talent and creativity within the network of those organizations. The Campaign has given dedicated people who are the wellspring of local organizations' talent a chance to come together, share their wisdom and be inspired by their colleagues' ideas.These Winning Strategies are a natural response to the enthusiasm and collective thought expressed through the Campaign. Documenting these strategies as case studies has been an important piece of the Campaign's work, in part because these written reports can disperse accounts of successful models to distant locales and a range of audiences. The objectives in publishing the Winning Strategies have been:1. To describe and record in a straightforward way NeighborWorks organizations' innovative approaches to helping families overcome barriers to home ownership;2. To illustrate how NeighborWorks organizations are implementing the comprehensive approach to home ownership called Full Cycle Lending, itself formalized under the aegis of the Campaign; and3. To offer NeighborWorks organizations and others interested in home-ownership promotion a way to learn from and perhaps replicate existing work in the field

Movement of deep-sea coral populations on climatic timescales

During the past 40,000 years, global climate has moved into and out of a full glacial period, with the deglaciation marked by several millennial-scale rapid climate change events. Here we investigate the ecological response of deep-sea coral communities to both glaciation and these rapid climate change events. We find that the deep-sea coral populations of Desmophyllum dianthus in both the North Atlantic and the Tasmanian seamounts expand at times of rapid climate change. However, during the more stable Last Glacial Maximum, the coral population globally retreats to a more restricted depth range. Holocene populations show regional patterns that provide some insight into what causes these dramatic changes in population structure. The most important factors are likely responses to climatically driven changes in productivity, [O_2] and [CO_3^(2–)]

Fifteen years of ocean observations with the global Argo array

More than 90% of the heat energy accumulation in the climate system between 1971 and the present has been in the ocean. Thus, the ocean plays a crucial role in determining the climate of the planet. Observing the oceans is problematic even under the most favourable of conditions. Historically, shipboard ocean sampling has left vast expanses, particularly in the Southern Ocean, unobserved for long periods of time. Within the past 15 years, with the advent of the global Argo array of pro ling oats, it has become possible to sample the upper 2,000 m of the ocean globally and uniformly in space and time. The primary goal of Argo is to create a systematic global network of pro ling oats that can be integrated with other elements of the Global Ocean Observing System. The network provides freely available temperature and salinity data from the upper 2,000 m of the ocean with global coverage. The data are available within 24 hours of collection for use in a broad range of applications that focus on examining climate-relevant variability on seasonal to decadal timescales, multidecadal climate change, improved initialization of coupled ocean–atmosphere climate models and constraining ocean analysis and forecasting systems.En prens

The Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration: History, Philosophy, and Culture

This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figur

The Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration: History, Philosophy, and Culture

This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Key Science Goals for the Next-Generation Event Horizon Telescope

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has led to the first images of a supermassive black hole, revealing the central compact objects in the elliptical galaxy M87 and the Milky Way. Proposed upgrades to this array through the next-generation EHT (ngEHT) program would sharply improve the angular resolution, dynamic range, and temporal coverage of the existing EHT observations. These improvements will uniquely enable a wealth of transformative new discoveries related to black hole science, extending from event-horizon-scale studies of strong gravity to studies of explosive transients to the cosmological growth and influence of supermassive black holes. Here, we present the key science goals for the ngEHT and their associated instrument requirements, both of which have been formulated through a multi-year international effort involving hundreds of scientists worldwide

Putting the Philosophy Back into Natural Philosophy: Ethics, Policy, and Using Philosophic Tools To Solve Scientific Problems

Here I discuss three different problems in science which can be advanced using philosophical tools. In each case I engage heavily with the science, drawing on the current state of play for the field, with the goal of providing helpful guidance to scientists and policy-makers.The first chapter looks at the risks associated with a newly developing invasive species control method - gene-drives, arguing that we can warrant certain harms by weighing up the damages against the potential benefits we might see on a global scale. Here I use techniques and ideas from applied ethics and policy to show that certain highly-damaging species, including European rabbits and ship rats, are viable targets for the technique despite the risk of their global extermination. The second dives into political theory, intervening on a long and complicated debate surrounding the mechanisms behind the theory of the democratic peace. Here I use concepts like conceptual engineering, over-determination, and a newly proposed argument for the reliability of science called ‘the tangle’, developed by myself, Cartwright, Hardie, Montuschi and Soleiman, to argue that there is no single mechanism, but instead many which work together to secure the reliability of the democratic peace.The third and final chapter points out a worrying trend of scientists and policy-makers thinking that the potential harms of science arise almost exclusively out of the application of research, rather than the research itself. Using tools fromanalytic philosophy I dive into the harms research can cause, proposing a new categorisation of these harms for use when creating moratoriums and bans. This categorisation system is then use on a real world case - research into the ‘gay gene’ - to show how it can help determine the most effective ways to mitigate harms via controlling what science can study

Argo Technical File User’s Guide

Technical files are a very important part of the Argo dataset. They allow us to diagnose systematic faults and track array performance. In the past it was assumed that all DACs knew how these should be filled and we only needed to provide details as to the names and formats. With the development of Argo format version 3.1 and the more detailed format checker, it would be useful to describe more fully how the technical files are generated and how their contents are determined. We therefore provide this user's guide to the technical files