Bridging the Capacity Gap: Cultural Practitioners' Perspectives on Data

In the summer of 2013, the Cultural Data Project (CDP) partnered with Slover Linett Audience Research to engage leading researchers in a virtual dialogue about cultural data and its role in supporting the long-term health, sustainability, and effectiveness of the cultural sector. The resulting white paper, New Data Directions for the Cultural Landscape: Toward a Better-Informed, Stronger Sector, identified six key challenges that appear to be inhibiting the field from more strategically and effectively engaging in data-informed decision-making practices.With that report as a starting point, the CDP sought to expand the conversation to include the perspectives of arts practitioners, artists, service organizations, and funding agencies working on the "front lines," by hosting a series of town hall-style meetings in five cities across the country. At these meetings, participants discussed the challenges identified in the New Data Directions report, articulated other challenges they're facing, and began to suggest solutions. In this report, we summarize what we heard and learned from approximately 185 cultural practitioners in town halls in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, and Philadelphia

Suspicious minds : the dramatisation of paranoia in Victorian poetry : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University

This thesis contains readings of a number of Victorian poems by Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti which dramatise paranoia and jealousy. A range of twentieth-century theories of paranoia (including clinical, Freudian and Lacanian) have been used as explanatory tools for interpreting the representations of paranoia in the poems. The reading of Tennyson's Maud is based on Freud's theory of homoerotic motives. The reading of Browning's "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'" is based on the Lacanian concepts of foreclosure and the Name-of-the-Father. The readings of the jealousy poems are based on both theories, and this section includes a discussion of the limitations of the theories as explanatory tools. The general approach has been to apply clinical and psychoanalytical constructs and explanations to each poem separately, although there is some discussion involving the comparison of paranoid behaviours and motives across all the poems. Areas for further research are suggested in the concluding chapter

A Laboratory for Relevance: Findings and Recommendations from the Arts Innovation Fund

Starting in 2006, a group of leading California arts institutions set out to innovate with new ways of working in the 21st century. With support from the Arts Innovation Fund of The James Irvine Foundation, they approached the challenge of innovation in a variety of ways, with a wide range of objectives and results. Across the board, the experimentation process prompted organizational reflection and change. Most grantees developed new levels of adaptive capacity, an attribute that many thought leaders believe will be essential for arts organizations, and the arts sector as a whole, to thrive into the future. After a strategic qualitative review of the innovation projects pursued by organizations participating in the Arts Innovation Fund, the Slover Linett evaluation team offers the following report with its insights and recommendations

Effects of Early-Adolescent, Mid-Adolescent, or Adult Stress on Morphine Conditioned Place Preference

Early-life stress is correlated with negative mental health outcomes, including illicit drug abuse. One mechanism that may contribute to drug abuse is stress-induced elevation of drug reward. Place conditioning paradigms show that exposure to uncontrollable stress as an adult enhances opiate conditioned place preference, CPP. The present work addressed whether early-adolescent, mid-adolescent, or adult stress amplified morphine CPP. Male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly assigned to stress or no stress conditions and received stress during early-, mid-adolescence, or adulthood. Stressors were unpredictable consisting of exposure to synthetic fox odor (trimethylthiazoline) and an elevated platform. Morphine place conditioning occurred during adulthood, and all animals received either morphine (15 mg/kg) on the initially non-preferred side or saline (1 ml/kg) on the initially preferred side. A post-test was conducted and time on non-preferred side was analyzed. A 2 (S/NS) x 2 (pre-/post-test) x 3 (early-adolescent/mid-adolescent/adult) mixed ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of test, F(1,42)=115.90, p \u3c .001

Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes

As interest in measuring and understanding the impact of arts investments in community development continues to grow, this new study, Setting the Stage for Community Change: Reflecting on Creative Placemaking Outcomes, commissioned by the Levitt Foundation and led by Slover Linett Audience Research, examines how "creative placemaking" interventions build social capital in communities, using permanent outdoor Levitt music venues as case studies. This research offers insights into arts-based strategies to promote social connectivity, a central goal of many creative placemaking efforts, and is a working illustration of what can and can't be learned from different impact measurement approaches

2008 Disability Status Reports: United States

The Annual Disability Status Reports provide policy makers, disability advocates, reporters, and the public with a summary of the most recent demographic and economic statistics on the working-age (ages 21-64) population with disabilities. They contain information on the population size, prevalence, employment, earnings, poverty, household income, home ownership, and activity limitations of working-age people with disabilities, as well as the composition of this population by age, race, gender, and educational attainment. This year, for the first time, the report also includes information about health insurance coverage and veteran’s service-connected disability rating