More Than Money: Making a Difference With Assistance Beyond the Grant

Examines foundation efforts beyond grantmaking such as training, advocacy, and new investment strategies to increase grantee effectiveness and impact. Assesses the benefits of such help, grantees' views, and implications. Includes case studies

The future Scotland wants:Is it really all about sustainable economic growth?

This article analyses the legal and practical implications of the Scottish Government's overall stated objective of increasing sustainable economic growth and the further implications that arise now that the term is formalised in legislation. It draws on the author's previous research into use of legal duties to deliver government objectives and the meaning and delivery of sustainable development and economic development. It is based on a critical review of Scottish Government policy, the provisions of the Regulatory Reform (Scotland) Act 2014, as well as the written and oral evidence submitted to parliamentary committees scrutinising Bills, their reports, and the subsequent Government responses. More broadly, the article examines the relationship between sustainable economic growth and the more widely accepted and used objective of sustainable development as complementary or contrasting policy objectives and legal duties. In doing so, it also aims to demonstrate the difficulties governments face in trying to put flesh on the bones of the Brundtland definition of sustainable development and accelerate progress towards sustainable living.</p

The Evolution of Sustainable Development in Scotland:A case study of Community Right-to-buy Law and Policy 2003–2018

Effective ownership, management and access to land are central for sustainable development and can impact significantly on the opportunities for local enterprise. In 1998, Scotland&rsquo;s Land Reform Policy Group concluded that &lsquo;Land reform is needed on the grounds of fairness and to secure the public good&rsquo; Consequently, Scotland has introduced various schemes that facilitate or compel the transfer of land from an existing landowner to a community body. Sustainable development is a primary objective of all these regimes making them exceptional both in UK and global terms and worthy of in depth examination. This article critically explores how the laws and policies relating to sustainable development within these community right-to-buy regimes have matured and evolved from their introduction in 2003 to the present. It reveals the beginning of a fourth era in sustainable development policy in Scotland which moves away from a single &lsquo;one size fits all&rsquo; approach to one where both sustainable development itself and wider sustainable development equations are tailored to land-use in Scotland and to the needs of each of the different community right-to-buy regimes. These developments evidence a significant maturity in the implementation and delivery of sustainable development in Scotland

AIDS-defining illnesses at initial diagnosis of HIV in a large Guatemalan cohort

AbstractBackgroundAnecdotal evidence suggests that a high proportion of patients diagnosed with HIV in Guatemala present with AIDS. There remain limited data on the epidemiology of AIDS-defining illnesses (ADIs) in Central America.MethodsWe conducted a retrospective cohort study of all patients living with HIV at the largest HIV clinic in Guatemala. Charts were analyzed for clinical and demographic data. Presence of an ADI was assessed by US Centers for Disease Control definitions; patients who presented with an ADI were compared with those without ADI using descriptive statistics.ResultsOf 3686 patients living with HIV, 931 (25.3%) had an ADI at HIV diagnosis, 748 (80.3%) of whom had CD4 counts lower than 200 cells/mm3. Those with ADIs were more likely to be male (67.5% vs 54.6%; P &amp;lt; .0001) and heterosexual (89.4% vs 85.0%; P = .005). The most common ADIs were Mycobacterium tuberculosis (55.0%), Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia (13.7%), esophageal candidiasis (13.4%), and histoplasmosis (11.4%). Histoplasmosis and HIV wasting syndrome were both more common among rural patients.ConclusionsIn this large Guatemalan cohort of patients currently living with HIV, a significant portion presented with an ADI. These data inform the most common ADIs diagnosed among survivors, show that histoplasmosis is more commonly diagnosed in rural patients, and suggest that HIV wasting syndrome may reflect missed histoplasmosis diagnoses.</jats:sec

Obscuration-dependent evolution of Active Galactic Nuclei

We aim to constrain the evolution of AGN as a function of obscuration using an X-ray selected sample of $\sim2000$ AGN from a multi-tiered survey including the CDFS, AEGIS-XD, COSMOS and XMM-XXL fields. The spectra of individual X-ray sources are analysed using a Bayesian methodology with a physically realistic model to infer the posterior distribution of the hydrogen column density and intrinsic X-ray luminosity. We develop a novel non-parametric method which allows us to robustly infer the distribution of the AGN population in X-ray luminosity, redshift and obscuring column density, relying only on minimal smoothness assumptions. Our analysis properly incorporates uncertainties from low count spectra, photometric redshift measurements, association incompleteness and the limited sample size. We find that obscured AGN with $N_{H}>{\rm 10^{22}\, cm^{-2}}$ account for ${77}^{+4}_{-5}\%$ of the number density and luminosity density of the accretion SMBH population with $L_{{\rm X}}>10^{43}\text{ erg/s}$, averaged over cosmic time. Compton-thick AGN account for approximately half the number and luminosity density of the obscured population, and ${38}^{+8}_{-7}\%$ of the total. We also find evidence that the evolution is obscuration-dependent, with the strongest evolution around $N_{H}\thickapprox10^{23}\text{ cm}^{-2}$. We highlight this by measuring the obscured fraction in Compton-thin AGN, which increases towards $z\sim3$, where it is $25\%$ higher than the local value. In contrast the fraction of Compton-thick AGN is consistent with being constant at $\approx35\%$, independent of redshift and accretion luminosity. We discuss our findings in the context of existing models and conclude that the observed evolution is to first order a side-effect of anti-hierarchical growth.Comment: Published in Ap

Femininity, Masculinity, and Body Image Issues among College-Age Women: An In-Depth and Written Interview Study of the Mind-Body Dichotomy

In this article we investigate college-age womens body image issues in the context of dominant femininity and its polarization of the mind and body. We use original data collected through seven in-depth interviews and 32 qualitative written interviews with college-age women and men. We coded the data thematically applying feminist approaches to the analysis. We conclude that the current standard of femininity disproportionately associates womens worth with their bodies. Differing from literature that suggests femininity is associated with physicality and masculinity is not, our research suggests that masculinity is also partly associated with physicality, but in a way that is linked to power and does not reduce masculinity to only physicality

Mid-infrared n-Ge on Si Plasmonic Based Microbolometer Sensors

The detection and amplification of molecular absorption lines from a chemical weapons simulant is demonstrated using plasmonic antennas fabricated from n-Ge epitaxially grown on Si. A free-standing Si0.25Ge0.75 microbolometer detector with n-Ge plasmonic antenna is demonstrated as an integrated mid-infrared plasmonic sensor