Understanding the Value of Backbone Organizations in Collective Impact

Effective backbone support is a critical condition for collective impact. In fact, it is the number one reason that collective impact initiatives fail. In this publication, we provide communities and organizations engaged in collective impact with guidance on the role of the backbone and how to understand and support its effectiveness.In the Greater Cincinnati region, collective impact has become the "new normal," and The Greater Cincinnati Foundation (GCF) has made a commitment to support the infrastructure of collective impact - the backbone organization itself - in an effort to sustain and scale long-term systemic change and impact in the community. However, the role of the backbone organization in collective impact is complex and can be difficult to explain.In early 2012, The Greater Cincinnati Foundation and FSG began a partnership to define the value of backbone organizations and better understand back-bone effectiveness by working with six local backbone organizations and collective impact initiatives

Doing and undoing gender violence in schools: An examination of gender violence in two primary schools in Uganda and approaches for sustainable prevention

Recent decades have seen huge expansion of research and policy frameworks into preventing violence against children, yet have also shown the persistence and intractability of this violence. While offering potential to challenge violence and inequality, schools are also spaces in which children experience significant acts of physical, emotional and sexual violence, wherein structural inequalities are learned and reinforced, and in which children construct and negotiate their gendered identities in relation to violence. School-based interventions have sought to prevent violence, however little is known about their long-term influence and sustainability. This thesis examines gender violence in two primary schools in Luwero District, Uganda, and the long-term influence of the Good School Toolkit intervention to prevent violence. It offers these findings to the broader field of sustainable approaches to violence prevention in schools. It draws on a qualitative study using ethnographic methods conducted in 2017, involving participant observation, individual interviews with pupils and teachers, participatory group discussions and a writing club with pupils. Underpinned by the view that a meaningful understanding of a school intervention to prevent violence against children is one rooted in a deep analysis of this violence, this study examines peer violence, teacher discipline violence and teacher sexual violence in two schools. It argues that these forms of violence are gendered, closely embedded within schools’ institutional structures, and highly interrelated. Drawing on the theoretical lenses of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Deborah Youdell and Raewyn Connell, this thesis offers a framework for understanding both how gender violence in schools is ‘done’, what it means for school femininities and masculinities, and how it may also be ‘undone’. This framework posits that there are multiple bodily-institutional regimes within schools and within which gender violence is deeply embedded. Interventions may have a sustainable influence on preventing violence by addressing these multiple regimes

Lonely heart columns: A novel and entertaining way of teaching students abstract writing skills

Abstract writing is a key skill for science graduates; they are a common feature in many of the standard forms of scientific dissemination such as scientific research articles. In this paper we present a novel and entertaining approach for teaching abstract writing using adverts from lonely heart columns (LHC). Student constructed full profiles of the authors of LHC and constructed LHC profiles of celebrities to illustrate the key sills in abstract construction. There was no significant difference between the grades achieved by student taught using LHC and a more traditional approach, suggesting there were no negative impacts from this delivery method. Student in LHC tutorial overwhelmingly enjoy the tutorial, 95% responded the question ‘how would you rate the enjoyment of this tutorial’ as ‘much’ or ‘very much’. In addition to abstract writing two thirds of students in LHC tutorial believed they improved their ability to speak in front of others and their creative thinking skills. The LHC tutorial is a novel approach to teaching and learning that is both enjoyable and effective

Species sensitivity assessment of five Atlantic scleractinian coral species to 1-methylnaphthalene

Coral reefs are keystone coastal ecosystems that are at risk of exposure to petroleum from a range of sources, and are one of the highest valued natural resources for protection in Net Environmental Benefit Analysis (NEBA) in oil spill response. Previous research evaluating dissolved hydrocarbon impacts to corals reflected no clear characterization of sensitivity, representing an important knowledge gap in oil spill preparedness related to the potential impact of oil spills to the coral animal and its photosymbiont zooxanthellae. This research addresses this gap, using a standardized toxicity protocol to evaluate effects of a dissolved reference hydrocarbon on scleractinian corals. The relative sensitivity of five Atlantic scleractinian coral species to hydrocarbon exposure was assessed with 48-h assays using the reference polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon 1-methylnaphthalene, based on physical coral condition, mortality, and photosynthetic efficiency. The threatened staghorn coral Acropora cervicornis was found to be the most sensitive to 1-methylnaphthalene exposure. Overall, the acute and subacute endpoints indicated that the tested coral species were comparatively more resilient to hydrocarbon exposure than other marine species. These results provide a framework for the prediction of oil spill impacts and impact thresholds on the coral animal and related habitats, essential for informing oil spill response in coastal tropical environments

Introduction to Computational Topology Using Simplicial Persistent Homology

The human mind has a natural talent for finding patterns and shapes in nature where there are none, such as constellations among the stars. Persistent homology serves as a mathematical tool for accomplishing the same task in a more formal setting, taking in a cloud of individual points and assembling them into a coherent continuous image. We present an introduction to computational topology as well as persistent homology, and use them to analyze configurations of BuckyBalls®, small magnetic balls commonly used as desk toys

“The Whole Island is a Jail and We the Warders”: States of Exception in Tasmanian Historical Fiction

Looking at two historical romances by women writers, Kathleen Graves’ Exile: A Tale of Old Tasmania (1945) and Isabel Dick’s Wild Orchard (1946), this article seeks to examine narratives of an early nineteenth-century Van Diemen’s Land that are apparently at odds with the 1940s Tasmania it was to become. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” as the theoretical underpinnings for this essay, I read both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century island as a site for the proliferation of bare life whereby the whole of society finds itself defined by its prison-like capacity to strip individuals of their right to life. In telling these stories in which not all lives are equal, it seems that Dick and Graves are attempting to situate their narratives firmly in the past where they cannot contaminate the present, and indeed, future of their island

Law, the domestic and sovereignty in interwar women's writing

My Ph.D. examines women’s writing in the interwar period through a questioning of the boundaries between the public and private sphere as traditional masculine forms of power based on a system of sovereignty and law enter the domestic realm. I also consider how power might be reimagined abroad. I juxtapose works of popular fiction from E.M. Hull, Agatha Christie and Marie Belloc Lowndes with the modernist writers Sylvia Townsend Warner, Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West. Like much popular fiction of the early twentieth century, the bestsellers I explore exist in a complex relationship with that of their “other” - modernism. Section One looks at the modernist short story writer Mansfield alongside Christie, the Queen of Crime. The conception of home, for both Christie and Mansfield, is always somewhat uncanny. My readings of sovereignty in Mansfield and Christie are very much underpinned by a notion of the domestic space which becomes permeable to the political sphere at certain times of crisis. By using Giorgio Agamben’s theory of bare life within the state of exception, I unpack the notion of how the public and private become conflated. In the uncanny domesticity which haunts the pages of both Mansfield and Christie, the category of femina sacra offers a more gender specific reading than that of homo sacer or bare life within which I examine the paradoxical notion of legalised murder. The two chapters of Section Two juxtapose Warner’s modernist fantasy novels with the popular desert romance novel of Hull. This section examines ways in which colonialism and imagined representations of colonial lands and the colonial “other” impacts on understanding of sovereignty and representations of power. Though apparently from two dissimilar literary worlds, Hull and Warner share a surprising affinity: I look at Warner’s imagined representations of colonial lands and the colonial other in terms of how these may impact on understandings of sovereignty and representations of power. I consider how the imagined space of her early novels is broadened to include the historical spaces of her later fictions. In the chapter on Hull I argue that representations of androgynous and cross-dressing women, a theme also apparent in Warner’s novels, allow for her heroines to inhabit positions of relative power in relation to their male counterparts. Section Three contrasts the modernist West with popular romance/psychological thriller writer Lowndes. Both writers also have a deep-seated concern with the domestic and its complex relationship with power and rule. Though neither of these authors are consciously writing within the Gothic tradition I draw on notions of this genre to explore the uncanny in relation to images of domesticity that find themselves tainted by the threat of murder. In this section I draw on Freudian psychoanalytic notions, both of the death drive and of das unheimliche, to unravel parallels between the works of these two authors specifically examining how representations of death and the recurrent notions of the opposing life and death drives can be read as enactments of the grand-narrative of sovereignty. Although my thesis is concerned with authors who were writing in and around the literary innovations characterised by the modernist movement, this is not a project about modernism in a straightforward sense; rather, I read somewhat marginal modernist figures alongside popular fiction writers who seem to function as auxiliary modernists. Whilst I am comparing the low-brow with the modernist I do not seek to place any value laden judgements on the relative literary merits of these works; though, on the whole, the popular fiction I examine takes a more conservative approach than that of its more innovative modernist counterparts, it still, at moments, disrupts expectations with its critical stance towards conceptions of sovereignty and law.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceArts and Humanities Research CouncilGBUnited Kingdo

Comparison of Infiltration Equations and their Field Validation with Rainfall Simulation

Infiltration is a complex process with many factors contributing to the rate. Different approximate equations for infiltration differ in the parameters they require and predict different infiltration rate curves. Five equations including those of Kostiakov, Horton, Holtan, Philip and Green-Ampt were compared to determine which one most accurately predicted measured infiltration rates from rainfall simulation events at two different locations. Parameters were developed from measured infiltration data and laboratory analyses of soil samples. The Green-Ampt, Holtan and Philip equations with respective root mean squared errors of 0.15, 0.17, and 0.19 cmh-1, provided the first, second and third best estimates of infiltration rates, for observed infiltration data at the University of Maryland's Research and Education Center in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. An atypical infiltration curve was observed for the Poplar Hill site on the Eastern Shore of Maryland for which infiltration rate was constant and equal to rainfall rate