Legislating the Normative Environment: Nonprofit Governance, SarbanesOxley and UPMIFA

Regulation of nonprofit investment and governance practices has migrated from traditional common-law principles to codified statutory law, affecting areas of nonprofit governance not addressed in the original legislation. Trustees will do well to heed this development.A phenomenon with far-reaching effects on nonprofit investment management and governance has become a little-noticed yet powerful force in boardrooms over the past decade. Despite its wide-ranging implications, this development has largely gone undocumented.This paper seeks to draw attention to this change and its implications, and to trace a transformation in thinking that has gained momentum in recent years. Briefly stated, regulation of key aspects of nonprofit governance and investment has, in important ways, ceased to be a matter of unwritten common law and has become primarily a matter of codified statutory law. While interpretation by courts remains fundamental to the application of these laws, it is nevertheless true that standards which previously varied from state to state around a set of core fiduciary principles are now being interpreted against much more uniform statutory standards

Assessing the State of Healthcare

Nonprofit healthcare organizations are confronting an unprecedented series of challenges as they strive to maintain positive operating margins in the face of declining reimbursement from insurance companies and governmental payers.In order to operate in this environment, healthcare organizations will need to consider the following:What is the role of the endowment in our healthcare organization?How do actual and potential donors evaluate our skill in managing our present endowment?How can we make the case for larger endowments – and contributions – at a time of fiscal uncertainty

An Investigation of the Phenomenon of Separation in the Air Flow Around Simple Quadric Cylinders

The tests, conducted at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of Stanford University, to investigate the phenomenon of separation in the air flow past geometric shapes are described in this report

Fiduciary Duty and Environmental Responsibility: Crafting A Low Carbon Response

The question of whether responsible investing practices expose the institution to the risk of impaired investment performance over the long term is not settled, but in many countries, notably within the European Union, legislation requiring consideration of responsible investment practices has been in place for several years and assets invested using responsible investing practices are substantial and growing, mainly among European public pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. In the United States, such legal requirements have been absent from the investment picture, but incentive programs designed to promote conservation and the use of alternative energy sources, which have long been in place at the federal level and within or among individual states, have led to a patchwork of regulations and subsidies without -- until now -- an overarching national framework. Civil society has also played a role, as students and faculty on many U.S. college campuses have focused on the presence in endowments' investment portfolios of assets related to carbon-based or fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas, demanding that trustees divest the portfolio of these assets. The divestment campaign is well-organized and articulate, but possible proposed federal regulatory changes will be of more immediate concern to trustees. Two major initiatives -- one domestic and one international in scope -- have recently brought into sharper focus the steps that may be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in coming years and decades, both in the U.S. and on a global scale. Implementation of the international Paris Agreement on greenhouse gas emissions and the proposed federal Clean Power Plan, both discussed more fully below, could lead to a reduction in the value of carbon-based assets currently carried on the balance sheets of oil-, coal- and gas-related companies. If there is a reasonable possibility that these assets could be revalued downward, owning them at their current value today could be viewed in hindsight as imprudent or excessively risky from a fiduciary point of view.For fiduciaries that accept this argument, the quandary is how to maintain a diversified portfolio that seeks to maximize long-term, risk-adjusted returns consistent with the institution's investment policy while at the same time responding to the possibility that carbon-based assets may become a material risk to future portfolio performance. In this paper, we describe the present situation and its implications for the future of carbon-related assets; summarize the investment implications for various categories of energy-related assets; and outline a range of actions that trustees may want to consider in deciding which path to take

Inter-species horizontal transfer resulting in core-genome and niche-adaptive variation within Helicobacter pylori

Background Horizontal gene transfer is central to evolution in most bacterial species. The detection of exchanged regions is often based upon analysis of compositional characteristics and their comparison to the organism as a whole. In this study we describe a new methodology combining aspects of established signature analysis with textual analysis approaches. This approach has been used to analyze the two available genome sequences of H. pylori. Results This gene-by-gene analysis reveals a wide range of genes related to both virulence behaviour and the strain differences that have been relatively recently acquired from other sequence backgrounds. These frequently involve single genes or small numbers of genes that are not associated with transposases or bacteriophage genes, nor with inverted repeats typically used as markers for horizontal transfer. In addition, clear examples of horizontal exchange in genes associated with 'core' metabolic functions were identified, supported by differences between the sequenced strains, including: ftsK, xerD and polA. In some cases it was possible to determine which strain represented the 'parent' and 'altered' states for insertion-deletion events. Different signature component lengths showed different sensitivities for the detection of some horizontally transferred genes, which may reflect different amelioration rates of sequence components. Conclusion New implementations of signature analysis that can be applied on a gene-by-gene basis for the identification of horizontally acquired sequences are described. These findings highlight the central role of the availability of homologous substrates in evolution mediated by horizontal exchange, and suggest that some components of the supposedly stable 'core genome' may actually be favoured targets for integration of foreign sequences because of their degree of conservation

WMTrace : a lightweight memory allocation tracker and analysis framework

The diverging gap between processor and memory performance has been a well discussed aspect of computer architecture literature for some years. The use of multi-core processor designs has, however, brought new problems to the design of memory architectures - increased core density without matched improvement in memory capacity is reduc- ing the available memory per parallel process. Multiple cores accessing memory simultaneously degrades performance as a result of resource con- tention for memory channels and physical DIMMs. These issues combine to ensure that memory remains an on-going challenge in the design of parallel algorithms which scale. In this paper we present WMTrace, a lightweight tool to trace and analyse memory allocation events in parallel applications. This tool is able to dynamically link to pre-existing application binaries requiring no source code modification or recompilation. A post-execution analysis stage enables in-depth analysis of traces to be performed allowing memory allocations to be analysed by time, size or function. The second half of this paper features a case study in which we apply WMTrace to five parallel scientific applications and benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness at recording high-water mark memory consumption as well as memory use per-function over time. An in-depth analysis is provided for an unstructured mesh benchmark which reveals significant memory allocation imbalance across its participating processes

TRIAD - Preliminary design of an operational earth resources survey system. 1969 summer faculty fellowship program in engineering systems design

TRIAD, preliminary design of operational earth resources survey syste

Transportation noise pollution - Control and abatement

Control and abatement of transportation noise pollutio