Core Support

Philanthropy's primary funding strategy -- restricted grants -- too often hamstrings grantees' ability to plan, invest, and respond to changes with vision, flexibility, and innovation. Since its inception, the F.B. Heron Foundation has primarily made core support grants. We believe that core support promotes effectiveness, innovation, leverage, and transparency among our grantees, as well as more candor between grantee and grantor. In this essay, we add our voice to the ongoing dialogue about a better balance between core support and restricted grants

Public servant schools in Canada: A concept for reconciliation

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has called on federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments of Canada to educate public servants about the history and legacy of Indian residential schools and related topics, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This article advances this call to action by conceptualizing “public servant schools” as government organizations that provide learning opportunities to public servants. The Canadian adult education literature, however, is largely silent on this topic, even though numerous examples can be found across branches and levels of governments within Canada. Drawing on material acquired through the Access to Information Act, this article breathes life into this topic by documenting the Canada School of Public Service and elements of its curriculum related to the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Review: Access in the academy: Bringing ATI and FOI to academic research

This article reviews Access in the Academy: Bringing ATI and FOI to academic research

On the likely dominance of WIMP annihilation to fermion pair+W/Z (and implication for indirect detection)

Arguably, the most popular candidate for Dark Matter (DM) is a massive, stable, Majorana fermion. However, annihilation of Majorana DM to two fermions often features a helicity-suppressed s-wave rate. Radiating a gauge boson via electroweak (EW) and electromagnetic (EM) bremsstrahlung removes this s-wave suppression. The main purpose of this talk is to explain in some detail why the branching ratio to a fermion pair is likely suppressed while the decay to the pair plus a W/Z is not. In doing so, we investigate the general conditions for s-wave suppression and un-suppression using Fierz transformations and partial wave expansions. Suppression for the 2-to-2 process is sufficiently severe that the EW and EM bremsstrahlung are likely to be the dominant modes of gauge-singlet Majorana DM annihilation. We end this talk with a discussion of the challenge presented by space-based data for Majorana DM models, given that the enhanced rate to radiated W and Z gauge bosons and their dominant decay via hadronic channels tends to produce more anti-protons than are observed.Comment: 22 pages, including five sets of figures and two tables; expands upon talk presented at the CETUP* Dark Matter Workshop, Lead, South Dakota, July 201

Extreme-Energy Cosmic Rays: Puzzles, Models, and Maybe Neutrinos

The observation of twenty cosmic-ray air-showers at and above 10^{20} eV poses fascinating problems for particle astrophysics: how the primary particles are accelerated to these energies, how the primaries get here through the 2.7K microwave background filling the Universe, and how the highest-energy events exhibit clustering on few-degree angular scales on the sky when charged particles are expected be bent by cosmic magnetic fields. An overview of the puzzles is presented, followed by a brief discussion of many of the models proposed to solve these puzzles. Emphasis is placed on (i) the signatures by which cosmic ray experiments in the near future will discriminate among the many proposed models, and (ii) the role neutrino primaries may play in resolving the observational issues. It is an exciting prospect that highest-energy cosmic rays may have already presented us with new physics not accessible in terrestrial accelerator searches.Comment: 12 pages, RevTeX, 4 figures, Expansion of talks given at NU2000 (Canada); Metepec, Mexico; RADHEP2000 (UCLA

A park by any other name : national park designation as a natural experiment in signaling

Site designation by the National Park Service conveys a unique set of signals to information-constrained potential visitors. Changes in designation thus offer natural experiments to evaluate the signaling importance of names. This paper estimates the visitation effect of the conversion of National Monuments to National Parks through panel data analyses of the 8 designation changes that occurred between 1979 and 2000. These conversions have substantial and persistent effects on annual visitation, indicating that designation signals are indeed significant and credible. These signals appear to be particularly important to information-constrained visitors from a broad national audience compared to more proximate state and metro populations who have better information about nearby sites. Furthermore, increased annual visitor flows to newly designated parks do not appear to occur at the expense of visitation at alternative sites. Finally, visits to these parks appear to be quasi-inferior goods, as visitation is inversely related to various measures of national income.Natural resources ; Recreation