The View from the Cliff: Government-Funded Nonprofits Are Looking Out on Steep Cuts and an Uncertain Future

Federal, state, and local government underwrites the bulk of the cost to support vulnerable people in our society. But most of the actual services are delivered by nonprofits operating under government contracts or grants. With the stimulus money gone, large federal spending cuts looming, several years of recession, and an ever-growing pension and healthcare burden, how are these nonprofits faring? What do they believe the future holds for publicly funded services and for them

Record of the marine cyanobacteria from the rocky shores of Bet-Dwarka and Okha, India

Citas de cianobacterias marinas dei litoral rocoso de Bet-Dwarka y Okha, IndiaKeywords. Cyanobacteria, Sea Shore, Flora, Bet-Dwarka, Okha, IndiaPalabras clave. Cianobacteria, litoral marino, flora, Bet-Dwarka, Okha, Indi

An Empirical Examination of Cognitive Absorption in a Computer-based Simulation Training Context

The purpose of this study is to conduct a conceptual replication of the model developed by Agarwal and Karahanna (2000) in the context of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) simulation. The model was tested using data collected from 251 students learning ERP in a simulated computer-based training environment. In general, results are consistent with the original study, where cognitive absorption positively influences perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. Nonetheless, there were some notable differences. Unlike the original study, this replication study found that the cognitive absorption had no direct impact on perceived usefulness, but the effect was indirect via perceived ease of use underscoring the uniqueness of computer-based training environment. Further, perceived usefulness had no significant impact on use intention. Moreover, we found a significant positive relationship between perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. The study controlled for age, gender, previous ERP experience, and business process experience

Diversity of navel microbiome in young adults

Introduction. Human skin microbial communities represent a tremendous source of genetic diversity that evolves as a function of human age. Microbiota differs between regions of oily and moist skin, and appears to stabilize with age. Aim. We have a minimal understanding of the time frame required for the stabilization of skin microbiota, and the role played by gender. In the current study, we examined the microbiota present in the navel region of college-attending young adults in the age group of 18–25 years and investigated if diversity is associated with gender (male and female). Method. The study involved 16 female and six male subjects. Isolated DNA samples from navel swabs were processed using the Nextera XT library preparation kit and sequenced using the MiSeq platform. Data were analysed using QIIME and statistical analysis performed in R. Results. Microbiota of navel skin is dominated by Corynebacterium and Staphylococcus and includes opportunistic pathogens like Clostridium and Pseudomonas . Also present as the major component of the flora were the organisms normally associated with the gastrointestinal tract such as Acinetobacter , Campylobacter , Klebsiella and organisms from the Enterobacteriaceae and Moraxellaceae families. Comparison of alpha and beta diversity of the microbiota in the male and female navel regions suggests that the flora is not statistically different (P\u3e0.05). However, pairwise comparison suggests that the abundance of 12 specific genera varied with gender, including higher abundance of Klebsiella and Enterobacter in females. Conclusion. Our findings indicate that the navel skin microbiota of young adults has a core microbiota of Corynebacterium and Staphylococcus . We also noted the presence of a significant number of opportunistic pathogens. A minor gender difference in the abundance of individual organisms was also observed

Miniature atomic magnetometer integrated with flux concentrators

High permeability magnetic flux concentrators are used to enhance the sensitivity of an atomic magnetometer operating in the spin-exchange relaxation-free regime. The magnetometer uses a millimeter scale 87Rb vapor cell and either mu-metal or Mn–Zn ferrite flux concentrators. The measured sensitivity gives excellent agreement with calculations of thermal noise from the concentrator material. The mu-metal concentrators allow a sensitivity of 50 fT Hz−1/2, limited by thermal current magnetic noise. The ferrite concentrators are limited by thermal magnetization noise at low frequencies, and reach a sensitivity of 10 fT Hz−1/2 for frequencies above 125 Hz

TEGLO: High Fidelity Canonical Texture Mapping from Single-View Images

Recent work in Neural Fields (NFs) learn 3D representations from class-specific single view image collections. However, they are unable to reconstruct the input data preserving high-frequency details. Further, these methods do not disentangle appearance from geometry and hence are not suitable for tasks such as texture transfer and editing. In this work, we propose TEGLO (Textured EG3D-GLO) for learning 3D representations from single view in-the-wild image collections for a given class of objects. We accomplish this by training a conditional Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) without any explicit 3D supervision. We equip our method with editing capabilities by creating a dense correspondence mapping to a 2D canonical space. We demonstrate that such mapping enables texture transfer and texture editing without requiring meshes with shared topology. Our key insight is that by mapping the input image pixels onto the texture space we can achieve near perfect reconstruction (>= 74 dB PSNR at 1024^2 resolution). Our formulation allows for high quality 3D consistent novel view synthesis with high-frequency details at megapixel image resolution