Volunteer Vetting Process within Nonprofit Organizations

This report uses multiple Ohio chapters of Big Brothers Big Sisters to analyze how children-centered nonprofit organizations manage the tension between efficiently and successfully meeting their objectives and ensuring child safety via their volunteer vetting processes. Organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters that rely heavily on volunteer participation face many risks when vetting volunteers. The process used to vet these individuals, including recruitment, screening, acceptance, and certification, is lengthy; however, there is a buildup of demand for volunteers while this process is taking place. This research looks to understand if the vetting processes are able to balance safety of children with efficiency of the process. Several methods were used for compiling data: internal surveys within Big Brothers Big Sisters; analysis of financial reports and grants of nonprofit organizations; and analysis of donor reports for these same organizations. The data accumulated within this research serves to determine if and how the vetting processes used by Big Brothers Big Sisters to vet potential volunteers is both successful and quick. Public opinion and reputation play a large part into the financial and overall success of nonprofit organizations, which is taken into account for success of the vetting process.No embargoAcademic Major: Operations Managemen

What If

I love music. All genres of music. I love the stories that come through in music. I love the songs that create that personal experience and drive me to think or feel more deeply. Five for Fighting just came out with that type of song. It’s called “What If”. There is a line in the song that goes What if I had your heart, what if you wore my scars. What if you were me? What if I were you? What if your life was my life? What if I was you? It resonates with me personally and with our mission here at SCCAP – we believe that everyone has a story, a profound story and a path that led them to the place where they are. But what really struck me in this song was the concept of seeing ourselves in someone else’s life

Connecting Ethics to FYS Class Participation

One goal of UNLV’s First-Year Seminars is that students are introduced to, and understand the purpose of, the University Undergraduate Learning Outcomes (UULOs). This activity introduces students to Citizenship and Ethics, focusing especially on applying ethics in situations directly relevant to students’ daily lives.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/btp_expo/1078/thumbnail.jp

Mimicking an It\^{o} process by a solution of a stochastic differential equation

Given a multi-dimensional It\^{o} process whose drift and diffusion terms are adapted processes, we construct a weak solution to a stochastic differential equation that matches the distribution of the It\^{o} process at each fixed time. Moreover, we show how to match the distributions at each fixed time of functionals of the It\^{o} process, including the running maximum and running average of one of the components of the process. A consequence of this result is that a wide variety of exotic derivative securities have the same prices when the underlying asset price is modeled by the original It\^{o} process or the mimicking process that solves the stochastic differential equation.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AAP881 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Reply to Gennaro

Last year Charlotte Shreve and I presented an argument that synesthesia contains evidence against higher order thought theories of consciousness. Rocco Gennaro took up the challenge and argued that H.O.T. theories like his could handle the example and dismiss the argument. Below we suggest otherwise. We think the traditional versions of H.O.T. theory are still vulnerable to our argument and we maintain that Gennaro’s version is as well

Showing Success: Student Stories on Film

In Fall 2019, we showed video interviews of successful (i.e., graduated) alumni to first-year seminar students in the hope that incoming students would be inspired to adopt similar success strategies leading to increased retention and completion of their UNLV degree. The Academic Success Center filmed interviews with ten UNLV graduates who took our first-year seminar, COLA 100E. These COLA 100E Success Stories were then edited into three videos, each focusing on a particular theme, such as the first-year transition, the major selection process, and the key tips for graduation. The goal was that these successfully-graduated students would serve as motivational role models for UNLV’s diverse first-year student population. Though the alumni echoed concepts taught in the class, we imagined these peers would be more relatable than the instructor alone, encouraging students to identify with and potentially adopt new approaches to and perspectives of success early in their college careers.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/btp_expo/1113/thumbnail.jp

Fiber optic data transmission

The Ohio University Avionics Engineering Center is currently developing a fiber optic data bus transmission and reception system that could eventually replace copper cable connections in airplanes. The original form of the system will transmit information from an encoder to a transponder via a fiber optic cable. An altimeter and an altitude display are connected to a fiber optic transmitter by copper cable. The transmitter converts the altimetry data from nine bit parallel to serial form and send these data through a fiber optic cable to a receiver. The receiver converts the data using a cable similar to that used between the altimeter and display. The transmitting and receiving ends also include a display readout. After completion and ground testing of the data bus, the system will be tested in an airborne environment

Parametric fit to electron transport properties

Experimental data acquired over the past few years were gathered, and parametric fits made to these data. The following properties of electron transport were represented by simple functions of atomic number and energy: transmitted electron number, transmitted electron spectra, range, backscatter coefficient, angular distribution, energy deposition, bremsstrahlung intensity and energy spectra, and bremsstrahlung angular distribution and photon attenuation. The formulas cover the energy ranges of interest in space shielding problems (0.1 to 10.0 MeV). Procedures for using these formulas in practical situations are suggested