Philanthropy in the News

Over the last two decades, the quantity of news coverage of foundations has gradually risen, but its quality remains highly superficial, according to this report by Philanthropy Awareness Initiative and University of Minnesota professor David Fan. In fact, nearly 99% of more than 40,000 stories since 1990 have been transactional in their content -- focused on grants made and dollars out the door, not on benefits achieved

Income Taxation of Farmer Cooperatives

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Scalable data abstractions for distributed parallel computations

The ability to express a program as a hierarchical composition of parts is an essential tool in managing the complexity of software and a key abstraction this provides is to separate the representation of data from the computation. Many current parallel programming models use a shared memory model to provide data abstraction but this doesn't scale well with large numbers of cores due to non-determinism and access latency. This paper proposes a simple programming model that allows scalable parallel programs to be expressed with distributed representations of data and it provides the programmer with the flexibility to employ shared or distributed styles of data-parallelism where applicable. It is capable of an efficient implementation, and with the provision of a small set of primitive capabilities in the hardware, it can be compiled to operate directly on the hardware, in the same way stack-based allocation operates for subroutines in sequential machines

First report of Diaphorina citri (Hemiptera: Psyllidae) in Costa Rica

In November 2003, the Asian citrus psyllid (Diaphorina citri) was found for the first time in Costa Rica, in Alajuela, Heredia and San Jose provinces. Figure 1 shows an adult female and nymphal instars of Asiatic citrus psyllid

A Discursive Investigation of Leading in Organisational Conversations

This paper considers “leadership as a process of social construction” (Uhl-Bien, 2006, p. 254). Using Wood’s (2005) process ontology this paper differs from the majority of other studies within relational perspectives of leadership (which demarcate who leaders ‘are’ before process is studied; Ramsey, 2013). This paper uses Wood’s perspective to explore how social constructions of leadership and of leaders are continually (re)produced in-process. Using Gergen’s (1994) ‘act + supplement’ theory to explore the performative effect (Searle, 1969; Austin, 1975) of conversations, this paper draws on the studies of Packendorff, Crevani, and Lindgren (2014), Crevani (2011) and Crevani, Lindgren, and Packdendorff (2010) by exploring the (re)production of direction in conversations as micro-processes of leadership. This paper also builds on Crevani and colleagues’ studies by focusing on the role of linguistic devices in the (re)production of leadership and leader constructions. In doing so this paper offers an alternative to studies that have explored the effect of leaders uni-directional use of linguistic devices on their followers (e.g. Eisenberg, 1984; Astley and Zammuto, 1992; Watson, 2004). Participant observation of a sales and marketing meeting and unstructured interviews with some of the attendees was carried out. Within conversations, talk about events, problems and opportunities were constructed into issues. These issues (re)produced direction (as a microprocess of leadership) by focusing actors’ attention and widening out or narrowing down social realities. The findings also highlight the subtlety through which leadership positions emerge. This was done through an extension and concertina of hierarchy which appeared within conversations, with some actor’s talk positioning both themselves and others as being responsible for contributing to social realities

Higher space mode analysis of a large cylindrical pulsed H₂O system

By utilizing a geometrically centered pulsed source internal to a large (B2g) ≈ 0.002) cylindrical H₂O system, the neutron flux was measured as a function of position and time. A least square fit of the data yielded the fundamental and five higher decay constants and amplitudes of the thermal neutron flux. Symmetrical and enhanced neutron densities were obtained as a result of the internal source. Long waiting times were unnecessary and data acquisition was accelerated. The decay constants were found to be independent of position, pulse width, counting time and rates, method of normalization, or waiting time. The decay constants were related to the bucklings by an analysis of the amplitudes without variance of the size of the system. This method gives Σav = (4759 ± 54) sec⁻¹, Do = (3.7084 ± 0.0897) x 10⁴ cm²/sec, L = (2.79 ± 0.05) cm, σaH = (323 ± 3) mb, and a mean neutron lifetime of (210 ± 2.4) µsec --Abstract, page ii

“It’s the Secret to the Universe”: The Communicative Constitution and Routinization of a Dominant Authoritative Text within a UK Cosmetics Company

A gap in Organization and Management Theory exists regarding how, as a relational phenomenon, authority routinely makes a difference to the daily functioning of organization. A ‘Communication as Constitutive of Organization’ (CCO; e.g. Cooren et al., 2011) view of text (e.g. Taylor et al., 1996) is identified as holding unrealized potential to address this omission. A nine-month ethnography of a UK cosmetics company, followed by an abductive analysis (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2007, 2011) of fieldwork material focusing on ventriloquism (e.g. Cooren, 2012), aesthetics (e.g. Hancock, 2005) and practice theory (e.g. Schatzki, 2006), provides original insight into how authority routinely acts. The thesis’s main contribution to knowledge is the crafting of ‘dominant text’ which is defined as; a series of orchestrated texts which simultaneously exercise authority by routinizing the daily workings of organization. To elaborate, actors are instructed and taught to make sure a ventriloqual text routinely directs clients’ attention toward a particular course of action. At the same time, interventions are made to ensure aesthetic and practice texts routinely remind actors to represent a collective identity and disciplines how they act. While CCO studies show how texts periodically exercise authority (Fauré et al., 2010; Güney and Creswell, 2012; Holm and Fairhurst, 2017; Jordan et al., 2013; Koschmann, 2012; Spee and Jarzabkowski, 2011), a dominant text enhances knowledge about how authority routinely organizes activities which constitute and characterize organization. Theoretical insights are also generated that extend the CCO project of developing a communicational interpretation of organizing and organization

Correcting for sub-grid filtering effects in particle image velocimetry data

Particle Image Velocimetry methodology results in a spatial averaging of the real velocity field into a set of discrete measured velocities: one for each interrogation cell. In the absence of measurement noise this filtering process results in a reduction of the measured turbulent kinetic energy and other second order statistics of the velocity field. The reduction in this energy will naturally be dependent upon the amount of turbulent energy at lengthscales smaller than can be resolved by the interrogation cells that make up the measurement grid. This paper investigates the effects of sub-grid scale filtering on the second order statistics of velocity. Several experiments are reported for which interrogation cell size to turbulent integral length scale ratios were varied. In addition, synthetic turbulent velocity fields with known spatial correlation functions are used to support experimental results and provide calibration for the estimation of the level of sub-grid filtering. It is suggested that to accurately capture all turbulent kinetic energy using PIV the interrogation cell should be at least of order 10 times smaller than the integral lengthscale of the flow. A method is then provided to estimate the level of sub-grid filtering should the interrogation cell be larger than this limit up to around the size of the integral lengthscale. With interrogation cells larger than this lengthscale then sub-grid filtering is such that second order statistics are reduced by over 50% and it should be considered unwise to rely on any second order statistics from such a scenario, corrected or otherwise