A Compass in the Woods: Learning Through Grantmaking to Improve Impact

The field of philanthropy is under increasing pressure to produce – and be able to demonstrate – greater impact for its investments. A growing number of foundations are moving away from the traditional responsive banker model to becoming more thoughtful and engaged partners with their grantees in the business of producing outcomes. In the process, they are placing bigger bets on larger, more strategic programs and initiatives.  What the field is striving to do now is to ensure that this evolution is based on validated theory, not wishful thinking or shots in the dark. The larger the investment, the more skilled foundations must become at managing risk – making informed decisions, tracking progress, adjusting action and learning – throughout the life of a program, so that foreseeable and unforeseeable changes do not torpedo an otherwise worthy collective effort. The traditional grant?to?evaluation?to?adjustment cycle is very long. Because many traditional grantmaking practices are proving to be too slow to adapt, these foundations are striving to better integrate real?time evaluation and learning into their operations in order to become more adaptive; more innovative; more impactful.We undertook this research project to inform how the tools and practices that support Emergent   Learning (described in the next section) can best help foundations and their communities – grantees, intermediaries and other stakeholders – improve the way they learn in complex programs and initiatives

The O and H stable isotope composition of freshwaters in the British Isles. 1, rainfall

An understanding of the hydrological cycle in stable isotopic terms requires the characterisation of rainfall. This paper reviews existing and new data for the British Isles. Rainfall at the Wallingford (Oxfordshire) collection station was collected daily from November 1979 to October 1980. Large variations in isotopic content were noted, sometimes from day to day. Winter rainfall was similar to summer in amount, and only slightly depleted isotopically. Amount and temperature correlations with δ18O were generally low, only the autumn and winter temperature relationships being significant. A 20-year monthly dataset from 1982 to 2001 for Wallingford gives the following regression: δ2H = 7.0δ18O + 1.2, a slope somewhat below the world meteoric line but consistent with the those from other long-term stations in NW Europe. The data showed uncorrelated maxima and minima for each year, but rather more consistent amount-weighted averages. Although there is only a small difference in gradient between summer and winter rainfall values, when plotted against the month of the year there are clear changes in the values of both isotopes, and the δ2H-δ18O relationship as demonstrated by the d-excess parameter. The isotope-amount correlation is low but significant, with summer months appearing to be well-correlated when considered in terms of month of the year. On this same seasonal basis temperature has a strong correlation throughout the year, giving a positive δ18O-temperature relationship of 0.25 ‰ per °C change. The Wallingford monthly record is compared with data from Keyworth (Nottinghamshire) and the Valentia station of the GNIP (IAEA-WMO Global Network for Isotopes in Precipitation) in SW Ireland. While not large, differences between the stations are broadly attributable to the balance between maritime and continental influences. Over the period September 1981 to August 1982 the maximum number of monthly collection stations was operating across the British Isles. While a comparison of the sites serves mostly to illustrate the variability of British weather in space and time, there is clear isotopic evidence for the predominance of frontal rainfall in winter and convective rainfall in summer. The effect of altitude on isotopic content was measured within a high-relief stream catchment in Scotland. The best correlations occurred during winter, when an average relationship of approximately –0.30 ‰ δ18O per 100 m increase in altitude was observed. It is well established that rainfall isotopic composition changes in response to alterations in climate. However these changes are difficult to detect isotopically in the short term, even when the changes are indexed, e.g. in the form of the NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation). The brief duration of rainfall isotope records is a further hindrance; for the British Isles proxies such as tree-ring cellulose may have some value in extending the record back

Geometrically Intrinsic Nonlinear Recursive Filters I: Algorithms

The Geometrically Intrinsic Nonlinear Recursive Filter, or GI Filter, is designed to estimate an arbitrary continuous-time Markov diffusion process X subject to nonlinear discrete-time observations. The GI Filter is fundamentally different from the much-used Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), and its second-order variants, even in the simplest nonlinear case, in that: (i) It uses a quadratic function of a vector observation to update the state, instead of the linear function used by the EKF. (ii) It is based on deeper geometric principles, which make the GI Filter coordinate-invariant. This implies, for example, that if a linear system were subjected to a nonlinear transformation f of the state-space and analyzed using the GI Filter, the resulting state estimates and conditional variances would be the push-forward under f of the Kalman Filter estimates for the untransformed system - a property which is not shared by the EKF or its second-order variants. The noise covariance of X and the observation covariance themselves induce geometries on state space and observation space, respectively, and associated canonical connections. A sequel to this paper develops stochastic differential geometry results - based on "intrinsic location parameters", a notion derived from the heat flow of harmonic mappings - from which we derive the coordinate-free filter update formula. The present article presents the algorithm with reference to a specific example - the problem of tracking and intercepting a target, using sensors based on a moving missile. Computational experiments show that, when the observation function is highly nonlinear, there exist choices of the noise parameters at which the GI Filter significantly outperforms the EKF.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure

Language and Ideology: A role for scientific metaphor

A number of prominent popular science writers have recently argued for the active appropriation of scientific language in the formulation of modern ideologies and ethical systems. A critical examination of scientific narratives in light of contemporary theories of metaphor and relevance suggests that scientific language indeed harbors the same emotive potential that is traditionally ascribed to religious language, and can exhibit potent transformative effects in shaping human thought. Also highlighted through this approach are the challenges of constructing scientific metaphors that are generally meaningful, accurate, and ethically responsible