Economic Effects on Million Dollar Giving

This study investigates the impact of economic factors on the number of charitable gifts of one million dollars or more within the United States using the Million Dollar List dataset. We investigate key donor groups: individuals, corporations, and foundations. Results indicate that individual donors are particularly responsive to underlying economic conditions; giving by foundations tends to be counter-cyclical, and corporate giving is not significantly associated with macroeconomic factors. We also find that economic conditions vary in their influence on giving to subsectors, and gifts to public benefit and human services organizations increase significantly during periods of recession. Findings from our study have direct implications for philanthropists, fundraisers, and policy makes as they seek to understand how economic conditions impact large gifts

Lyapunov-type inequalities for (m+1)(m+1)th order half-linear differential equations with anti-periodic boundary conditions

In this work, we will establish several new Lyapunov-type inequalities for $(m+1)$th order half-linear differential equations with anti-periodic boundary conditions, the results of this paper are new and generalize and improve some early results in the literature

Fabrication of B doped g-C3N4/TiO2 heterojunction for efficient photoelectrochemical water oxidation

With the development of clean and renewable energy, hydrogen produced via photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting has attracted considerable attention. However, to develop the photoanodes with stable and excellent PEC ability is still a big challenge. In our work, TiO2 nanorods decorated with boron doped g-C3N4 (BCN/TiO2) is fabricated via thermal polymerization method to improve the PEC performance. The BCN/TiO2 displays 4-fold increase of the photocurrent density (1.01 mA cm−2) at 1.23 V vs. RHE under irradiation (100 mW cm−2, AM 1.5 G). And the onset potential of BCN/TiO2 exhibits a negative shift with 100 mV. Attributed to the broad light absorption of BCN and hetero-junction forming between BCN and TiO2, the IPCE value is increased to 87.8% in 380 nm, and the charge separation and transfer efficiency are both increased. Doping metal-free inorganic material with heteroatoms is a simple and efficient strategy to increase the light absorption within visible light and charge transfer efficiency in PEC and photocatalytic applications

Giving in Chicago

The report examines the patterns of charitable giving by households and corporations in the region for 2013 and the characteristics of grantmaking by foundations in the same region for 2012 (the latest year with available data). Findings from the study offer a better picture of the philanthropic landscape in the Chicago metro area and how it compares to the national philanthropic environment

Constraint Based Compiler Optimization for Energy Harvesting Applications

We propose a method for optimizing the energy efficiency of software code running on small computing devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) that are powered exclusively by electricity harvested from ambient energy in the environment. Due to the weak and unstable nature of the energy source, it is challenging for developers to manually optimize the software code to deal with mismatch between the intermittent power supply and the computation demand. Our method overcomes the challenge by using a combination of three techniques. First, we use static program analysis to automatically identify opportunities for precomputation, i.e., computation that may be performed ahead of time as opposed to just in time. Second, we optimize the precomputation policy, i.e., a way to split and reorder steps of a computation task in the original software to match the intermittent power supply while satisfying a variety of system requirements; this is accomplished by formulating energy optimization as a constraint satisfiability problem and then solving the problem using an off-the-shelf SMT solver. Third, we use a state-of-the-art compiler platform (LLVM) to automate the program transformation to ensure that the optimized software code is correct by construction. We have evaluated our method on a large number of benchmark programs, which are C programs implementing secure communication protocols that are popular for energy-harvesting IoT devices. Our experimental results show that the method is efficient in optimizing all benchmark programs. Furthermore, the optimized programs significantly outperform the original programs in terms of energy efficiency and latency, and the overall improvement ranges from 2.3X to 36.7X