Investing in People

Foundations have long created programs to provide grants to individuals—most often in the form of fellowships, scholarships, and prizes. Several of these programs have become so prominent that they are now institutions in and of themselves. Consider just a few examples: the Pulitzer Prize, Fulbright Program, and MacArthur "genius" awards. Governments, as well as foundations large and small, fund individual support programs.The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has generously allowed the authors of this report to examine its portfolio of individual support programs to explore what the authors believe are some of the strategic fundamentals underlying this type of programming that could be applied to future individual support grantmaking. The purpose of this study is to inform those interested in individual support programs about not only some of the strategy considerations underlying this type of grantmaking but what these programs can be expected to achieve—and under what circumstances.

Efficient Identification of Equivalences in Dynamic Graphs and Pedigree Structures

We propose a new framework for designing test and query functions for complex structures that vary across a given parameter such as genetic marker position. The operations we are interested in include equality testing, set operations, isolating unique states, duplication counting, or finding equivalence classes under identifiability constraints. A motivating application is locating equivalence classes in identity-by-descent (IBD) graphs, graph structures in pedigree analysis that change over genetic marker location. The nodes of these graphs are unlabeled and identified only by their connecting edges, a constraint easily handled by our approach. The general framework introduced is powerful enough to build a range of testing functions for IBD graphs, dynamic populations, and other structures using a minimal set of operations. The theoretical and algorithmic properties of our approach are analyzed and proved. Computational results on several simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Code for paper available at http://www.stat.washington.edu/~hoytak/code/hashreduc

Necessary and Not Sufficient: the State of Evaluation Use in Foundations

Over the last decade "strategic philanthropy" has dominated the thinking of many big and ambitious foundations. Theoretically, foundations of this kind not only provide grant support to nonprofits, but importantly, assess social problems, develop strategies to solve them, and track the results of their efforts over time

The Efficacy of Telepractice in the Assessment and Treatment of Speech Disorders: A Systematic Review

Purpose: Children and adults with speech disorders face numerous barriers in accessing traditional face-to-face services with a speech-language pathologist. Telepractice may be a feasible solution. The aim of this systematic review was to investigate the efficacy of telepractice in the assessment and treatment of speech disorders in children and adults. Methods: Research articles were ascertained from Ovid MEDLINE, PsychInfo, and CINAHL using an established and consistent search strategy that utilized both medical subject headings and subject terms related to telepractice. The predetermined inclusion criteria included diagnosis of a speech disorder, participants across the lifespan, direct comparison of both delivery methods (i.e., telepractice to face-to-face), and objective outcome measures. Articles were excluded due to lack of speech disorder diagnosis, use of purely subjective outcome measures, and lack of direct comparison of delivery methods. Quality assessment was established by the authors using the criteria in the Assessing the Quality and Applicability of Systematic Reviews and a rating scale (i.e., \u27poor,\u27 \u27fair,\u27 \u27good,\u27 \u27strong\u27). Results: Electronic searches of the databases resulted in the acquisition of 16 full-text research studies, which were used in this systematic review. The quality of the studies ranged from \u27poor\u27 to \u27strong\u27 with a majority of the articles rated as \u27good.\u27 The studies explored telepractice efficacy in speech sound disorders, fluency disorders, dysarthria, apraxia, and voice disorders. Conclusions: Generally, the quality of intervention delivered via telepractice is comparable to traditional face-to-face therapy. Additional research involving diverse populations with varied levels of severity in natural environments is required to confirm the efficacy of the delivery method. It is imperative the use of telepractice is considered by each clinician on a per case basis.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/csdms/1007/thumbnail.jp

Improving Care at the End of Life

Reviews RWJF's investments in improving end-of-life care, impact on the field, and lessons learned, including the need to coordinate objectives, integrate strategies, tie strategies to policy changes and incentives, and link communications and evaluation

To Become Our Own Person

Produced by The Center on Disability Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa Honolulu, Hawaii and The School of Social Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, Texas for The Society for Disability Studies

A democratic constitution for Christians and Muslims

In the following excerpt from How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs, the Congress of the Syrian Arab Kingdom continues its debates on drafting a constitution in the spring of 1920. Previous chapters showed how the Congress convinced Prince Faisal to support Syria's Declaration of Independence on March 8, 1920. The Declaration announced Congress’ election of Faisal as King, and its intent to establish a constitutional monarchy. The Congress then moved into its new meeting hall in Damascus’ Marjeh Square. A constitutional committee, headed by the first Congress president, Hashim al-Atassi of Homs, drafted articles and presented them for debate. Chapter 13 detailed the stormy debate on electoral laws held in late April, where conflict flared on the question of whether to grant women the vote. Chapter 14 concerns debate on a second critical issue, the rights and representation of non-Muslim minorities. In early May, Hashim al-Atassi became prime minister, and Sheikh Rashid Rida (delegate of Tripoli) was elected to replace him as president of the Congress. The chapter ends when the constitutional committee presents a full draft of the constitution to Congress on July 5, 1920. The Congress voted to accept, in principle, all 148 articles. It then began the process of article-by-article ratification. By the time of the Congress’ last session, on July 19, it had fully ratified six articles. The following day, King Faisal declared a national emergency and dissolved the Congress. The Congress would never meet again. On July 24, the invading French defeated the Syrian army at the battle of Maysalun