Pathways to Grow Impact: Philanthropy's Role in the Journey

Since 2010, through the "Scaling What Works" initiative, GEO has fostered a conversation about scale that considers a variety of ways nonprofits are creating more value for communities and how funders are supporting their work. GEO's newest publication, "Pathways to Grow Impact", shares new learning about the role grantmakers should play. The publication is the result of a collaborative project with Ashoka, Social Impact Exchange, Taproot Foundation and TCC Group that sought to answer the question: How can grantmakers best support high-performing nonprofits in their efforts to grow their impact? "Pathways to Grow Impact" is for any grantmaker who wants his or her grant dollars to have a greater effect. The publication offers a framework for understanding different approaches to scaling impact, stories from nonprofit leaders who have successfully grown their organizations' impact, and practical recommendations for grantmakers seeking more effective ways to achieve better results

Investing in Leadership, Volume 2: Inspiration and Ideas from Philanthropy's Latest Frontier: Executive Summary

Presents case studies dealing with leadership development in the nonprofit sector and the challenges of translating research and theory into practice

The Source Codes of Foundation Culture

Over the last several years, GEO has been working to better understand what contributes to and impedes efforts to lead productive change in philanthropy. One theme that has arisen time and again is the importance of creating and nurturing an organizational culture that enables grantmakers to be most effective. Organizational culture is the personality, behaviors and underlying assumptions of an organization. While culture can be understood in various ways and is hard to pin down, it has a persistent influence on how an organization behaves. Over the course of our exploration we have become convinced not only that a positive internal culture is an essential bedrock for effective philanthropy, but we have also, as a sector, habitually neglected this important contributor to our success. We designed this publication to spark dialogue and to provide a first set of observations that will support a deeper exploration of culture in the field of philanthrop

The Firebreak Problem

Suppose we have a network that is represented by a graph $G$. Potentially a fire (or other type of contagion) might erupt at some vertex of $G$. We are able to respond to this outbreak by establishing a firebreak at $k$ other vertices of $G$, so that the fire cannot pass through these fortified vertices. The question that now arises is which $k$ vertices will result in the greatest number of vertices being saved from the fire, assuming that the fire will spread to every vertex that is not fully behind the $k$ vertices of the firebreak. This is the essence of the {\sc Firebreak} decision problem, which is the focus of this paper. We establish that the problem is intractable on the class of split graphs as well as on the class of bipartite graphs, but can be solved in linear time when restricted to graphs having constant-bounded treewidth, or in polynomial time when restricted to intersection graphs. We also consider some closely related problems

Keynote: The Fair Use Game

For years educators have operated under the maxim that if a copyrighted work is used for educational purposes, then it is not necessary to reimburse the holder of the copyright as one would expect to have to do for “commercial” purposes. Under current interpretations of the law, however, we are just beginning to discover that this is not necessarily the case. Using the “classroom clicker” response devices and an interactive PowerPoint quiz to elicit audience participation, we’ll be playing the Fair Use Game to see how much you really know about fair use practices in higher education! Related Links: Fair Use Check List Know Your Copy Rights (Association of Research Libraries) BSU Intellectual Property Rights & Copyrigh

Classifying Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease Events in Epidemiologic Cohort Studies

Rationale: One in 12 adults has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or asthma. Acute exacerbations of these chronic lower respiratory diseases (CLRDs) are a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Valid approaches to classifying cases and exacerbations in the general population are needed to facilitate prevention research

Erythromycin-nonsusceptible Streptococcus pneumoniae in Children, 1999–2001

After increasing from 1995 to 1999, invasive erythromycin-nonsusceptible Streptococcus pneumoniae rates per 100,000 decreased 53.6% in children from Baltimore, Maryland (US), from 1999 to 2001, which was partially attributed to strains related to the mefE-carrying England14-9 clone. The decline in infection rates was likely due to the pneumococcal 7-valent conjugate vaccine

The Potential for pathogenicity was present in the ancestor of the Ascomycete subphylum Pezizomycotina

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Previous studies in Ascomycetes have shown that the function of gene families of which the size is considerably larger in extant pathogens than in non-pathogens could be related to pathogenicity traits. However, by only comparing gene inventories in extant species, no insights can be gained into the evolutionary process that gave rise to these larger family sizes in pathogens. Moreover, most studies which consider gene families in extant species only tend to explain observed differences in gene family sizes by gains rather than by losses, hereby largely underestimating the impact of gene loss during genome evolution.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In our study we used a selection of recently published genomes of Ascomycetes to analyze how gene family gains, duplications and losses have affected the origin of pathogenic traits. By analyzing the evolutionary history of gene families we found that most gene families with an enlarged size in pathogens were present in an ancestor common to both pathogens and non-pathogens. The majority of these families were selectively maintained in pathogenic lineages, but disappeared in non-pathogens. Non-pathogen-specific losses largely outnumbered pathogen-specific losses.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We conclude that most of the proteins for pathogenicity were already present in the ancestor of the Ascomycete lineages we used in our study. Species that did not develop pathogenicity seemed to have reduced their genetic complexity compared to their ancestors. We further show that expansion of gained or already existing families in a species-specific way is important to fine-tune the specificities of the pathogenic host-fungus interaction.</p

COMODO: an adaptive coclustering strategy to identify conserved coexpression modules between organisms

Increasingly large-scale expression compendia for different species are becoming available. By exploiting the modularity of the coexpression network, these compendia can be used to identify biological processes for which the expression behavior is conserved over different species. However, comparing module networks across species is not trivial. The definition of a biologically meaningful module is not a fixed one and changing the distance threshold that defines the degree of coexpression gives rise to different modules. As a result when comparing modules across species, many different partially overlapping conserved module pairs across species exist and deciding which pair is most relevant is hard. Therefore, we developed a method referred to as conserved modules across organisms (COMODO) that uses an objective selection criterium to identify conserved expression modules between two species. The method uses as input microarray data and a gene homology map and provides as output pairs of conserved modules and searches for the pair of modules for which the number of sharing homologs is statistically most significant relative to the size of the linked modules. To demonstrate its principle, we applied COMODO to study coexpression conservation between the two well-studied bacteria Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. COMODO is available at: http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/∼kmarchal/Supplementary_Information_Zarrineh_2010/comodo/index.html