Recent developments in the credit card market and the financial obligations ratio

Credit cards ; Households - Economic aspects

The Road Less Traveled: Funders' Advice on the Path to Nonprofit Sustainability

(With apologies to Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, 1920.) As part of the Capital Ideas symposium co-hosted by the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University and the Nonprofit Finance Fund in March, 2007, an online survey was conducted about funder practices that support nonprofit sustainability. This article highlights the survey findings and the advice that funders offered from their own experiences as paths to greater nonprofit strength. Rather than a qualitative analysis of funding initiatives, this article presents guidance to the field from the field, as funders grappling with how best to strengthen the long term health of their grantees reflect on their works in progress. This article then goes a step further by annotating these lessons learned with the additional perspective offered from just four of the ten draft funding principles that have evolved from the Capital Ideas symposium with the hope of encouraging more funders to consider these principles and practices in their own work. The Capital Ideas survey generated 48 profiles of funding approaches, practices and strategies that support nonprofit organizational capacity building, long term financial health and or programmatic improvement. The lessons funders learned from those initiatives informed ten funding principles that were introduced at the Capital Ideas symposium on March 15, 2007 at Harvard University. Four of those draft principles, outlined below, offered concepts that resonated throughout the profiles and are offered as key steps for funders to consider as they reflect upon their own giving practices. These principles include: Understand when youre building or buying, and fund accordingly. Actively pool resources when more funds are required to achieve results. Minimize the transaction costs for grantees and funders of applying for and reporting on grants. Fund at the organizational rather than the programmatic level, even when your primary interest is in one program. This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 40. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Maternal schooling and comprehension of child health information in urban Zambia: is literacy a missing link in the maternal schooling-child health relationship?

This paper examines the relationship between literacy skills and comprehension of health information by studying mothers of young children in a high-density urban area in Zambia. Both decontextualized language and print literacy skills were assessed for each woman and the resulting scores were related to her comprehension of both broadcast and printed health information. The results indicate that fluency in a language is not sufficient for full comprehension of broadcast messages in the decontextualized type of language used in bureaucratic communication, and that a woman’s ability to use decontextualized language is associated with greater comprehension of such messages. Skill in using this type of language increases with years of schooling, even in the poorly equipped schools in Zambia, as does print literacy, even though the levels of comprehension achieved are well below their grade level on average for these women. Some implications of these findings for both health care providers and educators are then considered

Survey of finance companies, 2000

Against a backdrop of robust economic activity, the finance company sector expanded briskly over the second half of the 1990s. The value of receivables held by finance companies in the United States rose nearly 50 percent, or about 11 percent a year, between 1996 and 2000. Business lending remained finance companies' major line of activity; the importance to the sector of consumer lending and leasing declined slightly, and the importance of real estate lending rose a bit. These and other findings from the Federal Reserve's mid-2000 benchmark survey of finance companies, as well as developments in the sector since that time, are discussed in this article.Finance companies

The Admissibility of DNA Evidence: Minnesota No Longer Stands Alone

Guiseppe Tipiloura at the Northern Territory Library.Northern Territory Library photograper 16/1/2010

On the t-Term Rank of a Matrix

For t a positive integer, the t-term rank of a (0,1)-matrix A is defined to be the largest number of 1s in A with at most one 1 in each column and at most t 1s in each row. Thus the 1-term rank is the ordinary term rank. We generalize some basic results for the term rank to the t-term rank, including a formula for the maximum term rank over a nonempty class of (0,1)-matrices with the the same row sum and column sum vectors. We also show the surprising result that in such a class there exists a matrix which realizes all of the maximum terms ranks between 1 and t.Comment: 18 page