Grantees Report Back: Helpful Reporting and Evaluation Processes

Nonprofits are facing increasing expectations from their funders to demonstrate progress and effectiveness. Most foundations strive to understand their own impact in large part through the successes of their grants and grantees, and many within the philanthropic community are pushing to obtain evidence of effectiveness from the nonprofit organizations they support.At the same time, a number of foundations are also working to simplify reporting and evaluation processes. Project Streamline, for example, is an effort aimed at "reducing the burden on nonprofits" and freeing up "more time and money for mission-based activities." Recommendations to trim processes include funders "right-sizing" reporting and evaluation requirements, enabling web reporting, creating standardized reporting processes, and making other operational improvements.There can be tension between these dual emphases -- on better understanding effectiveness and on streamlining processes -- and at the center of this tension is how best to structure reporting and evaluation processes. Some funders push for a more rigorous and often time-intensive process, while others seek to trim it down to free grantees' time, resources, and energy for their core work. But how are grantees experiencing foundation required reporting and evaluation processes? How helpful do they find them? What actually matters most to grantees? To shed light on these questions, the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) collected survey responses from more than 24,000 grantees about their views of 130 foundations. We learned that: On average, grantees do not find current reporting and evaluation processes to be very helpful in strengthening their organizations and programs.Strong relationships between grantees and their funders are central to helpful reporting and evaluation processes.Grantees who report discussing their report or evaluation with their funder perceive the reporting or evaluation process to be more helpful -- yet nearly half of grantees say no discussion occurred

Exact Computation of a Manifold Metric, via Lipschitz Embeddings and Shortest Paths on a Graph

Data-sensitive metrics adapt distances locally based the density of data points with the goal of aligning distances and some notion of similarity. In this paper, we give the first exact algorithm for computing a data-sensitive metric called the nearest neighbor metric. In fact, we prove the surprising result that a previously published $3$-approximation is an exact algorithm. The nearest neighbor metric can be viewed as a special case of a density-based distance used in machine learning, or it can be seen as an example of a manifold metric. Previous computational research on such metrics despaired of computing exact distances on account of the apparent difficulty of minimizing over all continuous paths between a pair of points. We leverage the exact computation of the nearest neighbor metric to compute sparse spanners and persistent homology. We also explore the behavior of the metric built from point sets drawn from an underlying distribution and consider the more general case of inputs that are finite collections of path-connected compact sets. The main results connect several classical theories such as the conformal change of Riemannian metrics, the theory of positive definite functions of Schoenberg, and screw function theory of Schoenberg and Von Neumann. We develop novel proof techniques based on the combination of screw functions and Lipschitz extensions that may be of independent interest.Comment: 15 page

Genealogy Extraction and Tree Generation from Free Form Text

Genealogical records play a crucial role in helping people to discover their lineage and to understand where they come from. They provide a way for people to celebrate their heritage and to possibly reconnect with family they had never considered. However, genealogical records are hard to come by for ordinary people since their information is not always well established in known databases. There often is free form text that describes a person’s life, but this must be manually read in order to extract the relevant genealogical information. In addition, multiple texts may have to be read in order to create an extensive tree. This thesis proposes a novel three part system which can automatically interpret free form text to extract relationships and produce a family tree compliant with GED- COM formatting. The first subsystem builds an extendable database of genealogical records that are systematically extracted from free form text. This corpus provides the tagged data for the second subsystem, which trains a Naı̈ve Bayes classifier to predict relationships from free form text by examining the types of relationships for pairs of entities and their associated feature vectors. The last subsystem accumulates extracted relationships into family trees. When a multiclass Naı̈ve Bayes classifier is used, the proposed system achieves an accuracy of 54%. When binary Naı̈ve Bayes classifiers are used, the proposed system achieves accuracies of 69% for the child to parent relationship classifier, 75% for the spousal relationship classifier, and 73% for the sibling relationship classifier

Sound scattering by rough elongated elastic objects. II: Fluctuations of scattered field

Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 1992. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 92 (1992): 1665-1678, doi:10.1121/1.403906.Sonar echoes from unresolved features of rough objects tend to interfere with each other. Because of these interferences, properties of the echoes, such as its envelope level, will vary from realization to realization of stochastically rough objects. In this article, the nature of the fluctuations of the backscattered echo envelope of rough solid elastic elongated objects is investigated. A general formulation is initially presented after which specific formulas are derived and numerically evaluated for straight finite-length cylinders. The study uses both the approximate modal-series- and Sommerfeld–Watson-transformation-based deformed cylinder solutions presented in the first part of this series [T. K. Stanton, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 92, XXX (1992)]. The fluctuations of the backscattered echo envelope are related to the Rice probability density function (PDF) and shown to depend upon δ/a and [script L]/L in the Rayleigh scattering region (ka≪1) and kδ and [script L]/L in the geometric region (ka≫1), where δ is the rms roughness, a is the radius of the cylinder, [script L] is the correlation length of the roughness, L is the length of the cylinder, and k is the acoustic wave number in the surrounding fluid. There are similarities shown between these fluctuations in the geometric region and those from rough planar interfaces. In addition, analytical expressions and numerical examples show that the fluctuation or ``incoherent'' component of the scattered field is random only in amplitude—its phase approaches a constant value, in phase with the mean scattered field, which needed to be taken into account in the formulation. Finally, applications of the theory developed in this article to backscatter data involving live marine shrimp-like organisms are discussed.This work was supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research Grant Nos. N00014-89-J-1729 and N00014-90-J-1804

Application of pulse compression techniques to broadband acoustic scattering by live individual zooplankton

Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 1998. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 104 (1998): 39-55, doi:10.1121/1.424056.Distinct frequency dependencies of the acoustic backscattering by zooplankton of different anatomical groups have been observed in our previous studies [Chu et al., ICES J. Mar. Sci. 49, 97–106 (1992); Stanton et al., ICES J. Mar. Sci. 51, 505–512 (1994)]. Based mainly on the spectral information, scattering models have been proposed to describe the backscattering mechanisms of different zooplankton groups [Stanton et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 103, 236–253 (1998b)]. In this paper, an in-depth study of pulse compression (PC) techniques is presented to characterize the temporal, spectral, and statistical signatures of the acoustic backscattering by zooplankton of different gross anatomical classes. Data collected from various sources are analyzed and the results are consistent with our acoustic models. From compressed pulse (CP) outputs for all three different zooplankton groups, two major arrivals from different parts of the animal body can be identified: a primary and a secondary arrival. (1) Shrimplike animals (Euphausiids and decapod shrimp; near broadside incidence only): the primary one is from the front interface (interface closest to the transducer) of the animal and the secondary arrival is from the back interface; (2) gas-bearing animals (Siphonophores): the primary arrival is from the gas inclusion and the secondary arrival is from the body tissue ("local acoustic center of mass"); and (3) elastic shelled animals (Gastropods): the primary one is from the front interface and the secondary arrival corresponds to the subsonic Lamb wave that circumnavigates the surface of the shell. Statistical analysis of these arrivals is used to successfully infer the size of the individual animals. In conjunction with different aspects of PC techniques explored in this paper, a concept of partial wave target strength (PWTS) is introduced to describe scattering by the different CP highlights. Furthermore, temporal gating of the CP output allows rejection of unwanted signals, improves the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the spectra of selected partial waves of interest, and provides a better understanding of the scattering mechanism of the animals. In addition, it is found that the averaged PWTS can be used to obtain a more quantitative scattering characterization for certain animals such as siphonophores.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. OCE-9201264 and the U.S. Office of Naval Research under Grant Nos. N00014-89-J-1729, N00014-94-1-0452, and N00014-95-1-0287

Fashion and Sustainability: Consumption and Shared Responsibility

Indulgence in fashion has been indispensable in modern societies, as it is a crucial device for self-image and identity construction. With the advanced technology and globalization of production, the fashion industry has skewed towards fast fashion, making the latest trends available to mass consumers at affordable prices. This research aims to examine how Chinese consumers perceive sustainable consumption in the context of fashion. We endeavor to explore the factors that influence the engagement of sustainable consumption. This study aims not to argue whether sustainable fashion should mobilize or replace the current fashion system but to provide evidence on consumers\u27 perception of sustainability and explore potential factors influencing sustainable behavior