Philanthropic Grantmaking for Disasters

Outlines principles, best practices, and codes of conduct for humanitarian aid, including disaster relief and recovery; the evolution of Hilton's approach to disaster response grantmaking; current policies and practices; lessons learned; and suggestions

In all my years -- Notes on handicapping

I don\u27t like handicapping, in any sport, and never have. It\u27s an egalitarian practice-as I see it-without any significant merit. I\u27m firmly committed to the view that a society in which awards are commensurate with performance, productivity, is preferable to any egalitarian system. We should avoid like the plague all efforts to harass, restrict, or handicap the talented, the efficient, the superior performer. This is just as sound a stance in economics generally as in sports

Recalling George Oliver May and me

A recollection of the author\u27s contacts with his friend George Oliver May. These personal insights provide an added dimension to the previous article, May and Paton: Two Giants Revisited, authored by Henry Francis Stabler and Norman X. Dressel

A robust Bayesian land use model for crop rotations

Often, in dynamical systems, such as farmers’ crop choices, the dynamics are driven by external non-stationary factors, such as rainfall and agricultural input and output prices. Such dynamics can be modelled by a non-stationary stochastic process, where the transition probabilities are functions of such external factors. We propose using a multinomial logit model for these transition probabilities, and investigate the problem of estimating the parameters of this model from data. We adapt the work of Chen and Ibrahim to propose a conjugate prior distribution for the parameters of the multinomial logit model. Inspired by the imprecise Dirichlet model, we will perform a robust Bayesian analysis by proposing a fairly broad class of prior distributions, in order to accommodate scarcity of data and lack of strong prior expert opinion. We discuss the computation of bounds for the posterior transition probabilities, using a variety of calculation methods. These sets of posterior transition probabilities mean that our land use model consists of a non-stationary imprecise stochastic process. We discuss computation of future events in this process. Finally, we use our novel land use model to investigate real-world data. We investigate the impact of external variables on the posterior transition probabilities, and investigate a scenario for future crop growth. We also use our model to solve a hypothetical yet realistic policy problem

Wandering into accounting -- Notes on writing career

After urgent invitations by,the editors, W. A. Paton has sent us some recollecions of the circumstances leading to his interest in accounting, and of his experience as a writer in this field. The editors have added a bibliography of his major accounting works, but the list doesn\u27t include data regarding some of the translations mentioned in these reminiscences. Additional information is invited from readers who may be familiar with Paton\u27s writing

The World Humanitarian Summit: A Pivot Point in Philanthropy's Contribution to Addressing Humanitarian Crises

This paper calls on the philanthropic community to take advantage of the opportunity offered by the first World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in Istanbul in May 2016 to make important changes in the way it contributes its share of the global response to humanitarian crises. In Section 1, the paper looks at the challenges shared by all who contribute, including the philanthropy sector. Section 2 discusses philanthropy's current contributions and potential, including some of its shortcomings. Section 3 examines how the Summit is setting the stage for change -- change for which philanthropy can be a greater part. Section 4 concludes the paper with a set of actionable recommendations for how philanthropy's contribution to humanitarian crises can be greatly improved