KIDS COUNT Indicator Brief: Reducing the Teen Death Rate

Reviews data on causes of teen deaths and outlines strategies for improving motor vehicle safety; preventing violence, risky behavior, and suicide; supporting role models; and enhancing families' and communities' capacity to support healthy development

Optimal Entangling Capacity of Dynamical Processes

We investigate the entangling capacity of dynamical operations when provided with local ancilla. A comparison is made between the entangling capacity with and without the assistance of prior entanglement. An analytic solution is found for the log-negativity entangling capacity of two-qubit gates, which equals the entanglement of the Choi matrix isomorphic to the unitary operator. Surprisingly, the availability of prior entanglement does not affect this result; a property we call resource independence of the entangling capacity. We prove several useful upper-bounds on the entangling capacity that hold for general qudit dynamical operations, and for a whole family of entanglement monotones including log-negativity and log-robustness. The log-robustness entangling capacity is shown to be resource independent for general dynamics. We provide numerical results supporting a conjecture that the log-negativity entangling capacity is resource independence for all two-qudit unitaries.Comment: Changed title since previous version. 8 pages main text + 4 pages of appendices. Rewritten with some mathematical details moved to appendices. Accepted for publication in Physical Review

School Sanitation in Underserved Urban Areas in India

This paper discusses how GIZ is supporting the Ministry of Urban Development in improving the sanitation situation for the urban poor. It selected 47 schools in five Indian cities to significantly improve the sanitation conditions, aiming to build awareness and capacity. All schools showed measurable improvements on school sanitation at the end of the project

How National Foundations Can Support State-Level Policy and Civic Engagement: A Q&A With Geri Mannion

In this interview, Geri Mannion of Carnegie Corporation of New York shares her thoughts about the biggest challenge facing the country this election year and the role of capacity building in supporting civic engagement. She also offers practical tips for funding state-level efforts to change policy and engage communities

How Can We Help Our Grantees Strengthen Their Capacity for Evaluation?

Many of funders are already committed to evaluation as a tool to improve their programs and strategies, and are seeking ways to engage in this learning process in partnership with grantees. One critical aspect of understanding and growing the impact of grantmaking dollars is supporting the capacity of grantees to assess their progress and adopt a learning for improvement mindset. Many nonprofits already collect and analyze data on program performance and hope to develop more comprehensive learning agendas. However, the nonprofit sector continues to wrestle with finding the resources, time and space to take evaluation to its full potential. This Smarter Grantmaking Playbook piece offers grantmakers ideas for how to provide evaluation capacity support more effectively

Recent developments in photovoltaic energy by ERDA/NASA-LeRC

Application development activities were designed to stimulate the market for photovoltaics so that as costs are reduced there will be an increasing market demand to encourage the expansion of industrial solar array production capacity. Supporting these application development activities are tasks concerned with: (1) establishing standards and methodology for terrestrial solar cell calibration; (2) conducting standard and diagnostic measurements on solar cells and modules; and (3) conducting real time and accelerated testing of solar cell modules and materials of construction under outdoor sunlight conditions

Programmable H.263-Based Wireless Video Tranceivers for Interference-Limited Environments

In order to exploit the non-uniformly distributed channel capacity over the cell area, the intelligent 7.3 kBaud programmable videophone transceiver of Table I is proposed, which is capable of exploiting the higher channel capacity of uninterfered, high channel-quality cell areas, while supporting more robust, but lower bitrate operation in more interfered areas. The system employed an enhanced H.263-compatible video codec. Since most existing wireless systems exhibit a constant bitrate, the video codec's bitrate fluctuation was smoothed by a novel adaptive packetisation algorithm, which is capable of supporting Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) assisted operation in wireless distributive video transmissions, although in the proposed low-latency interactive videophone transceiver we refrained from using ARQ. Instead, corrupted packets are dropped by both the local and remote decoders, in order to prevent error propagation. The minimum required channel signal to interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) was in the range of 8-28 dB for the various transmission scenarios of Table I, while the corresponding video peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) was in the range of 32-39 dB. The main system features are summarised in Table I. Index Terms - H.263-based video communications, interactive wireless video, QAM-based video transmission, video communications in interference-limited environments, video tranceivers

Critical behavior of Griffiths ferromagnets

From a heuristic calculation of the leading order essential singularity in the distribution of Yang-Lee zeroes, we obtain new scaling relations near the ferromagnetic-Griffiths transition, including the prediction of a discontinuity on the analogue of the critical isotherm. We show that experimental data for the magnetization and heat capacity of $\mathrm{La_{0.7}Ca_{0.3}MnO_3}$ are consistent with these predictions, thus supporting its identification as a Griffiths ferromagnet.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Changed conten

Endogenous Rationing, Price Dispersion, and Collusion in Capacity Constrained Supergames.

This paper examines the feasibility of collusion in capacity constrained duopoly supergames. In each period firms simultaneously set a price-quantity pair specifying the price for the period and the maximum quantity the firm is willing to sell as this price. Under price-quantity competition firms are able to ration their output below capacity. For a wide range of capacity pairs, the equilibrium path providing the smaller firm with its highest stationary perfect equilibrium payoff requires that it undercut its rival’s price and ration demand. Furthermore, for some capacities and discount factors supporting security level punishments, price shading and rationing arise everywhere on the set of stationary perfect equilibrium paths yielding (constrained) Pareto optimal payoffs. That is, price shading may not only be consistent with successful collusion, it may be a requirement of successful collusion.Bertrand-Edgeworth ; Supergame ; Collusion ; Capacity