The Importance of Culture in Evaluation: A Practical Guide for Evaluators

Offers guidance on designing and conducting a cross-culturally competent program evaluation that takes into account how culture, social identity or group membership, and privilege and power affect responses. Discusses challenges and ways to address them

Addressing Health Disparities Through Organizational Change - Evaluation Report

In the coming decades, racial and ethnic minorities will constitute more than 50% of many states' populations -- including that of Colorado. Individuals of racial and ethnic minority status are disproportionally affected by disease and disability and have poorer health outcomes than do their white counterparts.1,2 These differences are disparaties in health. Even when minorities have the same insurance status, access, age income and chronic conditions, they still tend to receive lower-quality health care than the white population. Differences in access and quality constitute disparities in health care.3 Shifts in population, coupled with current inequalities in health status and quality of care, clearly establish the need for addressing these disparities.Recognizing the persistence of racial and ethnic health disparities, The Colorado Trust developed the Equality in Health Initiative in 2005. The Initiative provided funding for 14 organizations across the state of Colorado in the first funding cycle, supporting their efforts to reduce health disparities by addressing the needs of racial and ethnic minorities. The initiative intended to strengthen organizations' cultural competency so as to promote and ensure the following for racial and ethnic minority populations: 1) equality in treatment and medical services, 2) attainment of equal access to health care, 3) improvements of environmental conditions and 4) increased healthy behaviors. Grantees received technical assistance in three areas: cultural competency; program planning and implementation related to health disparities; and data collection and evaluation.The Colorado Trust believed if grantee organizations' culturally competent practices improved through technical assistance, interventions and networking then short term health outcomes would improve as well, ultimately leading to reductions in health disparities. This evaluation examined this conceptual model to determine the role organizational cultural competency played in improving short-term health and health care outcomes for racial and ethnic minority groups.Results showed that as grantees' cultural competency in the form of community relationships improved, so did their adaptations to their interventions as well as short-term health and health care outcomes. Cultural competency in the form of organizational policies and procedures predicted improvements in the short-term health and health care outcomes of service recipients. Based on the results of this evaluation, a new conceptual model was developed and is described in this report. Facilitating and challenging conditions to developing cultural competency are also outlined as well as lessons for funders, policy makers and grantees

The Journey Continues: Ensuring a Cross-Culturally Competent Evaluation

Follows up the 2007 report The Importance of Culture in Evaluation with scenarios of how cross-cultural issues emerge and expert commentary on how to address them. Highlights evaluators' roles in promoting social equity and other considerations

Equality in Health Highlights: Addressing Health Disparities Through Organizational Change

This publication briefly highlights results of the evaluation of The Colorado Trust's Equality in Health initiative. The initiative sought to decrease health disparities in Colorado by increasing cultural competency of health care organizations serving racial and ethnic minorities. Community Science, a social research and evaluation firm, conducted the evaluation

A STUDY OF REGENERATIVE BRAKING SYSTEM (RBS) INVOLVING MODIFIED BRAKE PEDAL FOR RETROFIT CONVERSION OF HYBRID ELECTRIC VEHICLE (HEV)

Regenerative braking system has always been a very important feature in all hybrid and full electric vehicles since it helps to improve on fuel economy, as well as conserve energy efficiency. Unlike conventional vehicles which apply the friction brake system and contribute to the loss of the kinetic energy in the form of heat energy and friction, regenerative braking can conserve the energy lost during braking. Issue is addressed as to why this project is carried out. There is a lack of regenerative braking performance study for a bench-testing prototyping stage in retrofit conversion of hybrid electric vehicles. Also, the current solution to implement a regenerative braking system in existing vehicle part is costly. In this project, alternatives are first, explored to design brake pedal assembly to detect brake pedal movement for regenerative braking. In order to achieve this, a linear potentiometer is selected. This is followed with the design of a voltage follower circuit to produce stable output voltage to the motor controller. Then, configuration of the circuitry to the motor controller is learnt and set-up. Last part of the step covers the monitoring and experimentation of the performance for regenerative current by using the lab equipment. The bench-testing is done in free or zero-load condition. Results obtained showed a very little regenerative current being fed back into the battery when the brake pedal is exerted at its maximum, with respect to different motor speed run. Further work can be carried out to test the actual regenerative performance when the prototype is fully mounted into the vehicle

Size-dependent behaviour of functionally graded sandwich microbeams based on the modified couple stress theory

Abstract Static bending, buckling and free vibration behaviours of size-dependent functionally graded (FG) sandwich microbeams are examined in this paper based on the modified couple stress theory and Timoshenko beam theory. To avoid the use of a shear correction factor, equilibrium equations were used to compute the transverse shear force and shear stress. Two types of sandwich beams were considered: (1) homogeneous core and FG skins and (2) FG core and homogeneous skins. Numerical results were presented to illustrate the small scale effects on the behaviours of FG sandwich beams. The results reveals that the inclusion of the size effects results in an increase in the beam stiffness, and consequently, leads to a reduction of deflections and stresses and an increase in natural frequencies and critical buckling loads. Such effects are more pronounced when the beam depth was small, but they become negligible with the increase of the beam depth

A nonlocal sinusoidal plate model for micro/nanoscale plates

A nonlocal sinusoidal plate model for micro/nanoscale plates is developed based on Eringen’s nonlocal elasticity theory and sinusoidal shear deformation plate theory. The small scale effect is considered in the former theory while the transverse shear deformation effect is included in the latter theory. The proposed model accounts for sinusoidal variations of transverse shear strains through the thickness of the plate, and satisfies the stress-free boundary conditions on the plate surfaces, thus a shear correction factor is not required. Equations of motion and boundary conditions are derived from Hamilton’s principle. Analytical solutions for bending, buckling, and vibration of simply supported plates are presented, and the obtained results are compared with the existing solutions. The effects of small scale and shear deformation on the responses of the micro/nanoscale plates are investigated

Characterization of silicon nanowire by use of full-vectorial finite element method.

We have carried out a rigorous H-field-based full-vectorial modal analysis and used it to characterize, more accurately, the abrupt dielectric discontinuity of a high index contrast optical waveguide. The full-vectorial H and E fields and the Poynting vector profiles are described in detail. It has been shown through this work that the mode profile of a circular silicon nanowire is not circular and also contains a strong axial field component. The single-mode operation, vector field profiles, modal hybridness, modal ellipticity, and group velocity dispersion of this silicon nanowire are also presented

A STUDY OF REGENERATIVE BRAKING SYSTEM (RBS) INVOLVING MODIFIED BRAKE PEDAL FOR RETROFIT CONVERSION OF HYBRID ELECTRIC VEHICLE (HEV)

Regenerative braking system has always been a very important feature in all hybrid and full electric vehicles since it helps to improve on fuel economy, as well as conserve energy efficiency. Unlike conventional vehicles which apply the friction brake system and contribute to the loss of the kinetic energy in the form of heat energy and friction, regenerative braking can conserve the energy lost during braking. Issue is addressed as to why this project is carried out. There is a lack of regenerative braking performance study for a bench-testing prototyping stage in retrofit conversion of hybrid electric vehicles. Also, the current solution to implement a regenerative braking system in existing vehicle part is costly. In this project, alternatives are first, explored to design brake pedal assembly to detect brake pedal movement for regenerative braking. In order to achieve this, a linear potentiometer is selected. This is followed with the design of a voltage follower circuit to produce stable output voltage to the motor controller. Then, configuration of the circuitry to the motor controller is learnt and set-up. Last part of the step covers the monitoring and experimentation of the performance for regenerative current by using the lab equipment. The bench-testing is done in free or zero-load condition. Results obtained showed a very little regenerative current being fed back into the battery when the brake pedal is exerted at its maximum, with respect to different motor speed run. Further work can be carried out to test the actual regenerative performance when the prototype is fully mounted into the vehicle

The Institutional Legitimacy of Disruptive Start-ups in Sharing Economy

The sharing economy, with innovative business models (e.g. ride sharing, house sharing, and crowdsourcing), has threatened and disrupted the traditional industries. However, the process of such disruptions and negotiation of new institutional legitimacy is messy. Our study attempts to utilize institutional legitimacy literature to understand the dynamic process of new institutional legitimacy formation in a sharing economy disruption and generate a framework to explain the factors which influence the legitimacy process. We used deep- learning technique to identify the institutional legitimacy issues surrounding Uber, a leading tech start-up in sharing economy, from news articles published between 2009 and 2016. The preliminary results show that institutional legitimacy of sharing economy disruption varies by time and geographical regions