The Magic Mirror - The Fashionista's world-view (and the rest of humanity's)

In this lecture, LCF Visiting Professor Peter York, author, journalist and broadcaster, looks at the contrasting attitudes to fashion amongst: 'fashionistas' (i.e. fashion professionals - but particularly high-end fashion journalists), and the rest of humankind. He argues that 'fashionistas' are - most of them - "quite astonishingly different" from the rest of humankind. This is a function of: * their 'expert' role * their place in the fashion market process * their milieu * their 'wardrobe opportunities' * their aesthetic education. 'Fashionistas', quite literally, see the world differently and talk about clothes differently. This means their reporting of fashion brings different criteria to bear, most of which are unacknowledged. Key differences are: * (at least while they're working) fashionistas develop the tastes of extremely rich women, and are enabled to satisfy them * fashionista language develops its own codes, distorting the meanings of familiar words (e.g. 'sexy') and introducing others (e.g. 'directional'), which only work in fashionland. * a total inability to acknowledge the role of age, class, the workplace or any other real world factors in real women's fashion options. The rest of humanity (broadly women readers of fashion coverage) have lives. These lives, situations and finances shape their views of fashion and their choices. Their concerns and language are wonderfully different from those of most 'fashionistas'. The misunderstandings between these contrasting world-views are richly comic and deeply sad

The Art & Science of Creating Effective Youth Programs

"The Art & Science of Creating Effective Youth Programs" utilizes findings from a national collective impact study conducted by Algorhythm through their Youth Development Impact Learning System (YDiLS), which surveyed 27 organizations, 80 programs and more than 3,000 youth. The YDiLS is an online evaluation tool through which youth complete pre and post surveys that measure the growth in six, research-based "Social and Emotional Learning" (SEL) capacities proven to be foundational to long-term success in life:1. Academic Self-Efficacy 2. Contribution 3. Positive Identity 4. Self-Management 5. Social Capital 6. Social Skill

Applying Science Models for Search

The paper proposes three different kinds of science models as value-added services that are integrated in the retrieval process to enhance retrieval quality. The paper discusses the approaches Search Term Recommendation, Bradfordizing and Author Centrality on a general level and addresses implementation issues of the models within a real-life retrieval environment.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, ISI 201

Fortnight

Fortnight is a two-week long, fully immersive, experience based in the interactions and communications of daily life. Up to 200 participants sign up to receive messages that are sent to their mobile phones, email, and home address; these messages contain a series of poetic nudges that encourage those participating to question their sense of place. Participants also receive daily invitations to visit locations throughout their city where they can pause to reflect on what it means to be here now. Fortnight enables the experience of “theatre” to penetrate beneath a seemingly brittle aesthetic surface of performance, deep into the consciousnesses of our participants as they begin to interact with and perceive world around us as the performance itself; the place where we act out our own daily lives. In Fortnight, the spectator becomes participant; the journey becomes narrative. Fortnight therefore subverts the notion of an audience, in which each spectator’s perspective is forced to examine not the situation and setting of performers on a stage, but rather the situation and setting of our own sense of place and the meaning we apportion to our everyday lives. Fortnight uses various forms of ubiquitous technology such as: Radio Frequency Identification (aka, RFID tags of the type contained in key fobs), which are used in badges sent to each participant that allow them to interact with real-world “portals” to trigger certain effects in their surroundings; QR technology (in the form of barcodes on posters that reveal additional hidden messages, should the participant choose to delve further; SMS messages; email; and, Twitter. Alongside this, older modes of communication such as handwritten letters, give Fortnight a decidedly low-fi aesthetic. Throughout Fortnight, participants are encouraged to explore the creative possibilities of pervasive and communicative media without reverting to mere technological fetishism. In Fortnight, each mode of communication is used not only for its functionality but also as symbols that bind the project and the participant together, rooting them to the here and now with the everyday tools of modern society. The mediated messages within Fortnight lead participants down a living, breathing rabbit hole where the familiar becomes unfamiliar and reality distorts. The project becomes an experience for the participant that is as immersive as their own life; creating an alternative reality, that not only co-exists alongside their own everyday realities, but also merges with them.This is a performance with shared responsibilities, reflecting the actions and consequences of our daily lives: what we put in, we get out

Building to Last: A Grantmaker's Guide to Strengthening Nonprofit Organizations, A Briefing Paper on Effective Philanthropy

This briefing paper includes an overview of capacity building, a step-by-step guide for enhancing organizational effectiveness, tools for building organizational effectiveness, and tips for further reading and resources

Building the Capacity of Capacity Builders: A Study of Management Support and Field-Building Organizations in the Nonprofit Sector

Provides an overview of the current state of management assistance, and promising capacity building practices. Examines the impact an MSO's own organizational capacity has on the quality of the services they provide. Includes recommendations

Ricardo Semler: Creating Organizational Change

A review of Creating Organizational Change by Ricardo Semler

Ricardo Semler: Creating Organizational Change

A review of Creating Organizational Change by Ricardo Semler

Local and global properties of conformally flat initial data for black hole collisions

We study physical properties of conformal initial value data for single and binary black hole configurations obtained using conformal-imaging and conformal-puncture methods. We investigate how the total mass M_tot of a dataset with two black holes depends on the configuration of linear or angular momentum and separation of the holes. The asymptotic behavior of M_tot with increasing separation allows us to make conclusions about an unphysical ``junk'' gravitation field introduced in the solutions by the conformal approaches. We also calculate the spatial distribution of scalar invariants of the Riemann tensor which determine the gravitational tidal forces. For single black hole configurations, these are compared to known analytical solutions. Spatial distribution of the invariants allows us to make certain conclusions about the local distribution of the additional field in the numerical datasets

Purification and characterization of a tartrate-sensitive acid phosphatase of Trypanosoma brucei

AbstractIn search for invariant surface proteins in Trypanosoma brucei bloodstream forms, acid phosphatase was investigated. Earlier work had shown that part of the cellular phosphatase activity is associated with the flagellar pocket of the parasite. It is demonstrated that T. brucei contains at least two membrane-bound enzymes, one is sensitive to the inhibitor L-(+)-tartrate while the other is resistant. The tartrate-sensitive phosphatase was purified to homogeneity by monoclonal antibody affinity chromatography and shown to be a glycoprotein of low abundance (13,000 molecules/ cell). It has an apparent molecular weight of 70,000 Da. The usefulness of acid phosphatase as a marker for characterizing the membrane lining the flagellar pocket is discussed