Engaging Local Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the Response to HIV/AIDS.

During the past few years, a number of key donor programs have scaled up their global response to the crisis of HIV and AIDS. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the World Bank’s Multi-country HIV/AIDS Program (MAP), and other bilateral donors and charitable foundations have raised significant resources to fight HIV/AIDS. Spending on HIV/AIDS in low- and middle-income countries increased from $1 billion in 2000 to$6.1 billion in 2004. By 2007, global resources for HIV/AIDS are expected to expand to $10 billion. Local non-governmental organizations (NGOs), faith-based organizations (FBOs), and community-based organizations (CBOs) have been at the center of the response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In many countries, they have been responsible for the majority of the resources reaching individuals and have played a leading role in developing and implementing sustainable strategies to mitigate and prevent HIV/AIDS. One of PEPFAR’s strategic principles is to encourage and strengthen faithbased and community-based non-governmental organizations. The identification of sustainable and efficient local NGOs and the capacity building of these partners is the cornerstone on which the effective engagement of local NGOs is built. The goal of this paper is to begin a discussion among donors, international and local NGOs, and multilateral and U.S. government representatives on how to effectively engage indigenous partners and transfer much-needed resources

Parent and Student Voices on the First Year of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program

In the 50 years since economist Milton Friedman published “The Role of Government in Education” scholars and policy makers have been debating how parental choice through market mechanisms can and does operate in education. Market “optimists” argue that education is a service that can be produced under a variety of arrangements and that parents are natural education consumers. Market “pessimists” argue that education is a public good that should be produced in government-run schools, and that school choice programs suffer “market failure” because only advantaged families will have the resources and experience to choose effectively

Proclaiming Jesus: Essays on the Centrality of Christ in the Church in Honor of Joseph M. Stowell

Joseph M. Stowell was president of The Moody Bible Institute of Chicago from 1987 to 2005, before returning to the pastorate. His life’s message is to preach the centrality of Christ in the Church.https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/faculty_books/1110/thumbnail.jp

Diane Arbus: Documenting the Abnormal

The late Diane Arbus once said, “Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw…there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you.”[1] Arbus was aware that no one is exempt from others’ gaze, including herself, a theme repeated throughout her work. In this essay, I will be examining the work of Diane Arbus that showed intimate snippets of the lives of those that would be labeled as “freaks”, “disabled”, “handicapped”, “grotesque”, and other terms that were often used to be degrading or dehumanizing. I will be specifically focusing on her photographs that depict subjects with visual bodily ‘abnormalities’ as well as disabled bodies. Diane Arbus, according to her critics, is one of the first key figures to have focused her work on people with such visual differences, living their daily life, through the evidential medium of photography. I argue that the criticisms Diane Arbus faced from art critics, institutions, and the public for her work were unfair. Those who criticized Arbus did so unjustly, for they compared the people Arbus photographed to a traditional standard of beauty found in art. Her critics also failed to examine Arbus’ own personal struggles as well as her intent to document her participants. Arbus purposefully photographed her participants functionally and contentedly living their own lives. To fairly analyze Arbus’ work, I will be examining the many factors that played into her personal life, career life, the world she and her participants lived in, and the effect they all left on art and ethics today. [1] Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus. (Millerton, N.Y: Aperture, 1972.), 1-2

Molecular Evolution of Drosophila Cuticular Protein Genes

Several multigene families have been described that together encode scores of structural cuticular proteins in Drosophila, although the functional significance of this diversity remains to be explored. Here I investigate the evolutionary histories of several multigene families (CPR, Tweedle, CPLCG, and CPF/CPFL) that vary in age, size, and sequence complexity, using sequenced Drosophila genomes and mosquito outgroups. My objective is to describe the rates and mechanisms of ‘cuticle-ome’ divergence, in order to identify conserved and rapidly evolving elements. I also investigate potential examples of interlocus gene conversion and concerted evolution within these families during Drosophila evolution. The absolute rate of change in gene number (per million years) is an order of magnitude lower for cuticular protein families within Drosophila than it is among Drosophila and the two mosquito taxa, implying that major transitions in the cuticle proteome have occurred at higher taxonomic levels. Several hotspots of intergenic conversion and/or gene turnover were identified, e.g. some gene pairs have independently undergone intergenic conversion within different lineages. Some gene conversion hotspots were characterized by conversion tracts initiating near nucleotide repeats within coding regions, and similar repeats were found within concertedly evolving cuticular protein genes in Anopheles gambiae. Rates of amino-acid substitution were generally severalfold higher along the branch connecting the Sophophora and Drosophila species groups, and 13 genes have Ka/Ks significantly greater than one along this branch, indicating adaptive divergence. Insect cuticular proteins appear to be a source of adaptive evolution within genera and, at higher taxonomic levels, subject to periods of gene-family expansion and contraction followed by quiescence. However, this relative stasis is belied by hotspots of molecular evolution, particularly concerted evolution, during the diversification of Drosophila. The prominent association between interlocus gene conversion and repeats within the coding sequence of interacting genes suggests that the latter promote strand exchange

Conservation of a Coptic Tunic Fragment

"In 1979 the Museum acquired half of a Coptic tunic as a gift. It arrived in the Museum neatly folded in a padded envelope measuring 10 x 14 inches. Upon inspection, the fabric appeared to be relatively supple, and it was decided that unfolding the fabric would not cause too much harm. What follows here is the report of the subsequent conservation measures taken to stabilize one of the largest and best archaeological textiles in the Museum's collection."--First paragraph.Includes bibliographical reference

Family Reflections on the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program: Final Summary Report

During the spring of 2004, the first federally funded voucher program – the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) - was established. The School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP) recognized that publicly-funded school vouchers represent a relatively new and unstudied approach to school choice and education reform. To address this need, the SCDP requested and received funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation to capture the “Parent and Student Voices on the OSP.” A total of 110 families, representing 180 students, that applied during the first two years of the Program volunteered to participate in this study. As the last installment in a four-part annual series that began in 2005, this report summarizes key findings from the previous reports and provides a general overview of the respondents’ “reflections” upon their three or four years in the Program. Using a phenomenological approach, which includes focus groups, personal interviews and keypad polling information gathering techniques, participants were given multiple opportunities to share or describe their experiences. A consumer framework was often used to contextualize the families’ experiences. Their insights continue to shape the scope and direction of the OSP, and they will help inform other efforts to provide low income families with access to quality school options

Robot Learning through Crowd-Based Games

The field of robot learning from demonstration focuses on algorithms that enable a robot to learn new abilities from examples provided by a human teacher. We develop a system that enables users to remotely control a KUKA youBot robot to play a game of Whack-A-Mole through a common web browser. We collect data on how users play and utilize a decision tree learning algorithm to teach the robot to play autonomously. We find that filtering data by score does not significantly improve learned robot performance over using all data. Using A/B testing techniques, we find that motivational game features noticeably improve the quantity and quality of collected data