Towards communicating the value of volunteers: lessons from the field
Well-managed volunteers are assets that charities insist they cannot do without. Nevertheless, few charities publish the value of their volunteers' efforts in annual reports. Charities' current practices in communicating volunteers' value reflect the regulatory environment, but not their increasing professionalization. Valuing volunteers can assist charities in services planning and to build their reputation in their communities. However, charities' managers must also accept that judgement is required in negotiating the sensitive nature of defining volunteers' value.
What Counts: Social Accounting for NonProfits and Cooperatives
Tables and Figures. Foreword. Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. The Social Economy. 3. Social Accounting: Theory and Practical Applications. 4. A Social Return on Investment Approach. 5. Socioeconomic Impact and Resource Statements: Junior Achievement of Rochester. 6. An Expanded Value Added Statement. 7. Volunteer Value Added: Five Nonprofits. 8. A Social Accounting Toolkit. 9. Making It Count. References. Index.
Fast Intra- and Inter-Prediction Mode Decision in H.264 Advanced Video Coding
Summary H.264/AVC, the latest video standard, adopts rate-distortion optimization (RDO) technique to obtain the best intra- and interprediction, while maximizing visual quality and minimizing the required bitrate. However, the full RD cost calculation for all intra-prediction modes, the exhaustive searches for finding optimal motion vectors for all block sizes, and the multiple references frame procedure considerably increase its computational complexity with the allowed number of prediction modes. In order to reduce the complexity, here we propose a new approach for both inter- and intra-mode decisions, that takes into account the two effective parameters, image content type and the quantization parameter. The proposed fast intra-prediction mode selection strategy uses some observations on the interior and the exterior MB properties to select a subset of candidate modes at different quantization parameters. Also, the fast inter-prediction mode decision approach uses split/merge procedure based on correlation of motion vectors and motion details of video objects. Also, here we use a context-based adaptive method to speed up the multiple reference frames motion estimation that is based on inter- and intra-prediction residues and quantization parameters. As such, only a subset of inter- and intra-modes is chosen for RDO calculation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm, reduces the total encoding cost with negligible loss in PSNR and a slightly increase in the required bitrate, when compared to RDO and other fast algorithms reported in the literature.