Formative programme evaluations assess intervention implementation processes, and are seen widely as a way of unlocking the 'black box' of any programme in order to explore and understand why a programme functions as it does. However, few critical assessments of the methods used in such evaluations are available, and there are especially few that reflect on how well the evaluation achieved its objectives. This paper describes a formative evaluation of a community-based lay health worker programme for TB and HIV/AIDS clients across three low-income communities in South Africa. It assesses each of the methods used in relation to the evaluation objectives, and offers suggestions on ways of optimising the use of multiple, mixed-methods within formative evaluations of complex health system interventions.
The evaluation's qualitative methods comprised interviews, focus groups, observations and diary keeping. Quantitative methods included a time-and-motion study of the lay health workers' scope of practice and a client survey. The authors conceptualised and conducted the evaluation, and through iterative discussions, assessed the methods used and their results.
Overall, the evaluation highlighted programme issues and insights beyond the reach of traditional single methods evaluations. The strengths of the multiple, mixed-methods in this evaluation included a detailed description and nuanced understanding of the programme and its implementation, and triangulation of the perspectives and experiences of clients, lay health workers, and programme managers. However, the use of multiple methods needs to be carefully planned and implemented as this approach can overstretch the logistic and analytic resources of an evaluation.
For complex interventions, formative evaluation designs including multiple qualitative and quantitative methods hold distinct advantages over single method evaluations. However, their value is not in the number of methods used, but in how each method matches the evaluation questions and the scientific integrity with which the methods are selected and implemented.
Evidence of the effectiveness of healthcare programmes is important to informing policy and practice decisions [1–3]. Understanding how these programmes are implemented, including how contextual and programmatic factors contribute to the success or failure of a programme , is equally important . Formative evaluations – evaluations that assess intervention implementation processes  – can contribute to this understanding. These evaluations should aim to identify the key components of a programme as implemented and to explore the factors affecting its implementation, in relation to the implementation context. Formative evaluations findings can guide the effective replication of programmes in other settings . Such formative evaluations are often designed as multiple, mixed-methods evaluations , defined as the application of a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches [9–11], to allow them to address adequately a wide range of questions regarding how a programme was implemented.
Multiple, mixed-methods evaluations are used widely, particularly for programmes that involve complex interventions or a complex mix of interventions [12, 13]. Multiple, mixed-methods approaches have a number of advantages, including providing a more holistic and textured picture of a programme and its implementation [12, 14, 15], and having the potential to redress the inherent biases that any single method has [16, 17]. They also allow the corroboration, or triangulation, of findings [11, 16, 18, 19]. However, these approaches raise a number of challenges including assembling a research team with skills and experience across multiple methods ; acquiring the resources needed to implement data collection using multiple strategies ; and undertaking analysis of data collected using multiple approaches .
This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of a multiple, mixed-methods approach applied in a formative evaluation of a community-based health programme that addressed the burden of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) in Cape Town, South Africa. This evaluation, the findings of which are reported elsewhere , comprised an unusually wide range of methods, including two methods – time-and-motion analysis and diary keeping – that are less commonly reported in the context of programme evaluation. The evaluation therefore provided a valuable opportunity to reflect on how we applied these methods and the implications of the methodological choices that we made. This paper aims to assess each of the methods used in relation to the evaluation objectives, and offers suggestions regarding ways of optimising the use of multiple, mixed-methods within formative evaluations of complex interventions.
This paper is based on critical reflections by the research team on the evaluation we conducted. Both during and after the evaluation, the evaluation team reflected on the methods used, paying attention to the following issues: (i) ensuring that all programme components were evaluated; (ii) the comparative ease or difficulty in implementing data collection; (iii) the perceived contribution of the findings from each method to the overall evaluation findings; and (iv) the process of drawing together the findings from across the study. The lead researcher (WO) kept notes of these discussions, which occurred mainly during progress reports to the evaluation team, and also kept process notes of methodological issues that arose during the fieldwork. These notes, together with the reflexive discussions within the evaluation team, formed the basis for this paper. The ideas described here evolved further through the writing process.
TB and HIV/AIDS remain high priority public health problems in South Africa: at the time of the evaluation presented here (2009–2010), South Africa had the largest HIV/AIDS epidemic in the world, with approximately 5.6 million people living with HIV/AIDS . The country also had the third highest TB burden in the world, with an infection rate of 981/100 000 . This situation was complicated by the high rates of TB/HIV co-infection: 128,457 people were reported to be co-infected with TB and HIV in 2010 in South Africa . At the time of this study, the Cape Town Metropole (Metro), the study site, had the highest TB incidence rate in South Africa of 752 per 100 000 population . The antenatal HIV prevalence in this health district was 19.1% (range 8.8% – 33.1%). This was lower than the national prevalence of 30.2% . Approximately 47% of TB clients in this district were also living with HIV/AIDS .
The Metro district has been active in developing community-based programmes to deliver care to people living with TB and HIV/AIDS. The district has a strong focus on employing lay health workers (LHWs – sometimes referred to as community health workers) as treatment providers in these programmes , and of integrating care for co-infected clients . Within the Metro, a number of different models for delivering TB and HIV/AIDS care have been tested, including (i) the Enhanced TB Adherence (ETA) programme, where TB treatment was modeled on the anti-retroviral therapy (ART) programme's supported self-administration approach ; and (ii) a model of care delivered with a mix of directly-observed-therapy (DOT) and ETA for TB clients and tailored support for ART clients . These models were supported by the two health authorities in the Metro: the City of Cape Town, Department of Health (CDoH) and the Western Cape Provincial Government Department of Health (WCDoH), in collaboration with a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who employed and managed the LHWs involved in these programmes.
The formative evaluation that provided the data for this methodological assessment was commissioned by an NGO who provided community-based primary healthcare services in poorer areas of the Metro, on behalf of the Metro health authorities. This programme of community-based services used different models across the programme sites to integrate LHW-led care for people with TB and/or HIV/AIDS (Table 1). However, these integration models used the same LHW structure across the sites. Specifically, each LHW team comprised of a group of LHWs and a team leader. The team leaders were, like the LHWs, recruited from the community, and both groups had no formal, professionally certified healthcare training but received training in the context of their work. The team leaders had been promoted, based on their experience and quality of work, to manage a LHW team. They had less contact with clients than LHWs, and served as link between the staff of the local primary health care clinic and LHWs in the field. The LHWs conducted treatment and adherence support visits to clients. These visits included observation of the taking of TB treatment and ART, pill counts, checking for treatment side-effects and social support to clients. The three LHW teams were all female.
Clients on TB treatment received directly observed therapy with a LHW for the first month of treatment. Thereafter, treatment was self-administered with LHW support visits. LHWs monitored ART clients daily for the first two weeks of treatment. For the next two weeks, stable clients were visited weekly and thereafter they received one or two visits per month. Clients doing not well on ART were more closely monitored and often referred back to the clinic.
TB treatment and ART followed the same strategy: after two weeks of clinic-based treatment, monthly medication was supplied to clients who were assessed as being adherent to treatment. These clients then self-administered their treatment with weekly LHW support visits.
DOT was administered to all TB clients. The ART protocol was the same as in Site 1.
The NGO purposefully selected three low-income communities for the study, based on the different models of care implemented in these sites. All three sites had ethnically diverse populations and high levels of unemployment, with a significant proportion of residents below the government's poverty threshold of USD 320 per month (Table 2). Most residents lived in informal housing. Site 3 differed in that it was a slightly wealthier community that included formal housing areas.
The evaluation aimed to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the community-based treatment support programme in order to inform programme development. The objectives were, firstly, to provide a detailed description of the programme and its implementation; and, secondly, to explore the experiences and perceptions of clients, LHWs and programme managers regarding the programme. The evaluation did not aim to assess the effectiveness of the programme in relation to client health outcomes.
The evaluation objectives led to the mixed-methods approach summarised in Table 3. Each method, which we refer to as a 'sub-study', targeted different actors and components of the programme. Our approach was informed by a number of considerations: it not only matched the complexity of the programme, but offered the required depth (through the use of qualitative approaches) and breadth (through the use of a quantitative survey approach) of information sought by the commissioning NGO. Table 3 outlines the rationale for and implementation of each method.
The evaluation team comprised four researchers, who worked across the three study sites, over nine months. We conducted the time-and-motion study and the client survey within a specified time period (eight and nine weeks respectively). Data collection for the other sub-studies was done as and when participants were available. We developed protocols for each sub-study detailing the what, how, who and when of each evaluation activity. All instruments were piloted and refined before a sub-study was formally implemented (see Table 4 below for an example of a structured observation guide).
➢Apart from the client, who else, and what were their relationship to the client?
• Apart from discussing the client's health, what other service/s did the worker provide?
• Any notable barriers for the LHW in delivering services?
• How did the visit end?
The data collection methods for the evaluation are shown in Table 5. Data from these sources were synthesised in the analysis to: (a) describe the models of care; and (b) explore the views and experiences of (i) clients; (ii) LHWs; and (iii) programme managers. Both the methods and divergent participant groups allowed us to identify similarities and, equally importantly, differences between the groups on how they perceived and experienced delivering healthcare services in the study sites.
We present below a critical assessment of each method's challenges and strengths, and discuss how the data collected contributed to achieving the evaluation objectives. This is preceded by a brief summary of the overall evaluation findings.
Overall, the evaluation  confirmed the feasibility of the programme, with its variations across the implementation sites, for providing integrated community-based treatment and adherence support to TB, HIV/AIDS and co-infected clients. The evaluation highlighted a number of strengths of the programme, in particular the dedicated LHW teams, and offered recommendations to address its challenges, such as the low proportion of LHWs' time that was spent in direct contact with clients. Table 6 provides a summary of the key messages from the evaluation report.
1. The study confirms the feasibility of integrating community-based care for clients living with TB and HIV. Evaluation of the health outcomes of integrated models that are implemented at scale, and outside of research settings, is needed to confirm the effectiveness of these approaches.
2. Providing support to co-infected clients using one LHW appears to be less intrusive and disruptive than having different LHWs support these clients, and is an important benefit of integrating community-based services.
3. Clients were very positive about their experiences of services rendered by LHWs. The majority of clients on directly observed treatment for TB would prefer self-administered treatment at home, however a notable proportion of these clients indicated a preference for LHW support during self-administration.
a. LHW training include both the bio-medical aspects of TB and HIV and the psycho-social aspects of living with these diseases.
b. 'Caring for the Carer' programmes be put in place to help LHWs manage these stresses.
5. Identifying clients at-risk of non-adherence and who need intensified LHW care and support, and using this information to prioritise LHWs' work, is an effective way to manage the caseload of LHWs.
6. Establishing and maintaining high morale among LHWs is an important component of ensuring the delivery of quality services. Providing non-monetary incentives in recognition of their work is as important to LHWs as increased stipends.
7. The monitoring and evaluation tools used in the study sites strengthened the delivery of LHW services. These tools should be included in programmes that employ LHWs to provide treatment and adherence support to individuals living with TB and HIV.
The time-and-motion study, reported in full elsewhere , had several strengths. First, it complemented the data obtained from interviews with the LHWs. The observations helped to address our concerns that (i) the interview data may have been affected by poor recall of earlier events (since the interviews were conducted towards the end of the data collection period), and (ii) LHWs and team leaders may have emphasised views and activities that they saw as reflecting favourably on them.
Second, the data highlighted the impact of context on programme implementation. For example, the findings showed that, on average, LHWs spent only 46% of their time with clients. The remainder of their time was spent on walking to, and waiting at, clients' houses – a reflection of the large geographical areas they covered and the challenge of making appointments with clients who could only be contacted in person. This information is important to understanding what might constitute realistic work targets for community-based LHWs, allowing programme managers to plan appropriately during programme implementation.
Third, the observations identified a number of innovative practices that may otherwise not have been revealed. For instance, knowing that TB and HIV/AIDS are highly stigmatised in the communities in which they worked, LHWs developed a range of strategies to protect the confidentiality of their clients. In one case, the LHW pretended to be 'just a friend visiting' when people who were not aware of the HIV positive status of the client arrived unexpectedly. In another case, the LHW concealed her role from other community members by placing her work papers inside a popular magazine. Both strategies reduced the likelihood of accidental disclosure of the client's status within the neighbourhood.
Fourth, this sub-study provided us with unanticipated opportunities to engage the team leaders and LHWs in spontaneous, informal conversations. The data from these conversations contributed substantively to our understanding of the day-to-day realities of the work of LHWs. For example, during one set of observations a LHW casually showed us where a recent gang-related shooting had happened. This led to a conversation about work-related risks, but also revealed LHWs' perception that they were treated with respect in the communities in which they worked and were seldom the target of crime and gang-related violence. These data, in turn, led to insights regarding the importance that LHWs attach to being respected and appreciated by the communities in which they work and by their managers.
Finally, the contact with clients during these observations provided opportunities to probe emerging issues. For instance, one encounter raised the question of whether age differences between LHWs and clients impact on their relationship and, if so, how. These unscripted, spontaneous interviews yielded such rich data that we recorded these for all nine time-and-motion participants in Sites 2 and 3 (but not in Site 1 as the data collection was already completed).
There were, however, two important challenges in implementing this approach. Firstly, it was labour intensive and therefore only feasible to implement with a small sample of LHWs over a limited time period. Ideally, this sub-study would have run over a longer time period to ascertain if other factors, such as seasonal changes, impact on LHW activities. Secondly, some LHWs may have wanted to emphasise their challenging working conditions and may therefore have chosen, on time-and-motion observation days, to visit problematic clients who lived furthest from the clinic that was responsible for their care. However, all of the clients visited had been assigned to the LHWs at the time of the evaluation, and it is therefore likely that the data provided a reasonable reflection of LHWs' daily work.
A key strength of the client survey was that it highlighted important implementation differences across the study sites. For example, 92% of client participants in Site 1 reported having received weekly or bi-weekly LHW visits, compared to the 36% and 52% of participants in Sites 2 and 3 respectively. The information from participants also indicated that some LHWs were not adhering to visit guidelines developed by the managing NGO: only 51 (36%) of the 142 clients on ART, or on ART and TB treatment, reported that they had received adherence support visits. The visit guidelines note that all ART clients should be visited regularly.
These results were met with concern by the NGO who managed the LHWs and commissioned the evaluation. The NGO asked us to check our analysis and to conduct focus group discussions (FGDs) with LHWs to confirm the survey findings. This further work did not change our findings, but provided useful additional data on how context shapes programme implementation: in the FGDs, LHWs with high client caseloads explained that it made sense to prioritise visits to clients who were not doing well on treatment. Those who were doing well, they noted, were not visited unless this was requested by the client or their health facility. This illustrates the utility of the relatively simple survey that we conducted in identifying potentially important implementation issues that required further exploration using other methods. These additional data, in turn, contributed to generating a more nuanced understanding of how LHWs organise their work.
The observations of LHWs' interactions with clients, which we defined as the intervention moments of the programme, were far more challenging than the time-and-motion observations because of their intention to involve both clients and LHWs. The challenges we encountered included clients being ill at ease with the presence of the observer; clients appearing to report only positive aspects of the care they received from LHWs; clients not reporting their non-adherence to treatment; and LHWs pressuring the observer to help with clients who they viewed as problematic. These suggest important power imbalances, not only between the research observer and clients but also between LHWs and their clients.
Our observations of these intervention moments helped to confirm the findings of the time-and-motion sub-study regarding the high levels of stigma attached to TB and HIV/AIDS in these communities. For example, they revealed how LHWs used nonverbal approaches to communicate with clients regarding an impending visit, in order to protect their status from other people. These additional data therefore offered insights into issues that shaped programme delivery and that may otherwise not have come to our attention.
An unintended consequence of the sub-study was the close relationship that developed between the observer and the LHWs whom she shadowed, allowing the LHWs to more easily share their experiences. For example, LHWs discussed during the observations that they felt that their training did not equip them sufficiently to work with and support clients who were not taking their treatment as prescribed. Another unexpected consequence of the observational work was that the LHWs asked the observer to help them with clients who were not adhering to their treatment.
These formal, structured interviews were intentionally conducted towards the end of the evaluation. We drew on the preliminary findings from the time-and-motion and structured observation studies, as well as the preliminary survey results, to develop interview schedules. These were therefore informed by the on-the-ground realities of the programme and helped us to clarify issues raised by other components of the evaluation, in particular the reasons for differences in the way the programme was implemented across the study sites. For instance, we found after probing that the health authorities had sanctioned variations in LHW visit protocols, as they had not finalised and standardised a model of care. Another example of how the interviews helped to clarify questions emerging from other data sources concerned our time-and-motion observation that team leaders often felt overwhelmed by their duties. When we raised this with them during the interviews, they explained that they found it particularly stressful to deal with instances in which LHWs were not adhering to visit or other guidelines and, at the same time, maintain a high morale amongst their LHW team.
The diary data provided fascinating information about the day-to-day struggles of clients to cope with their illness in the context of extreme poverty and appalling living conditions. A key strength of this method was the unique insights it provided into the ways in which LHWs support clients, which went as far as one LHW visiting a client in prison. The study also offered longitudinal data on the treatment trajectory for two people living with HIV who were initiated on ART shortly before being recruited for this sub-study. Diary keeping allowed us to understand the high value placed by clients on receiving support from someone who was familiar with their living conditions and circumstances, and who understood the challenges that they faced.
Although the diary keeping provided valuable data, it is a labour intensive approach and needs to be continued over long periods of time if the illness experiences of people are to be captured adequately. In this evaluation, two participants kept diaries for 24 weeks while another two participants were involved for the full nine months of the evaluation. The volume of data generated over these long periods is challenging to analyse. An additional challenge lies in the recruitment of participants: not all people have the capacity to keep a diary or interest in doing so, and careful explanation and recruitment is therefore needed. In our study we asked the LHWs to identify potential 'diary participants'. Given these challenges, diary-keeping may not be a useful tool for all formative evaluations. Evaluators need to weigh the benefits of the very in-depth data obtained against the resources needed to collect and analyse these.
We reflect below on the methodological concerns cutting across the methods used in this evaluation and attempt to identify important issues in planning and conducting formative evaluations of complex interventions using multiple, mixed-methods. Based on these reflections, we also make suggestions for future evaluations (Table 7).
It has been suggested that neither the number of methods, nor the mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, determine the quality of an evaluation, but rather the extent to which these align with the questions the evaluator seeks to answer . The first objective of this evaluation was to provide a detailed description of the programme and the second was to explore the perspectives and experiences of all the social actors involved in it. We anticipated that one method would not easily achieve these objectives and therefore chose a multi-method approach which we hoped would result in more comprehensive and holistic evaluation findings. This holistic approach is illustrated by our findings on team leaders' work, and their perceptions and experiences of this. The time-and-motion study provided a quantitative description of how they organised their time while the interviews added insights into their feelings of being overburdened with work demands. This triangulation involved exploring and comparing data on the same phenomenon, in this case what it meant to be a team leader, that we had collected using different methods [11, 16]. It offered a more inclusive and textured account than would have been possible using only one data collection method. We would also argue that the triangulation of data from different methods also strengthened the trustworthiness of the data [11, 13, 16].
Similarly, the diary keeping and observations yielded rich data regarding the life and health experiences of people living with stigmatised illnesses and attempting to manage complex treatment programmes under very difficult conditions. These two sub-studies gave us insights into the "hidden moments" of community-based healthcare. One such moment was observing the touching empathy and support with which a LHW comforted and encouraged a client with HIV and AIDS who wanted to give up on life. This observation prompted us to look more carefully at the commitment that LHWs showed to their clients and the reasons for this. We were also able to triangulate the findings from the diary keeping and observations with the survey findings which also focused on clients' experiences of the healthcare services they received. For example, the survey showed that 92% of clients felt that the LHW visits were helpful or very helpful. This perception was repeatedly echoed by clients during the diary keeping and structured observations of LHW visits.
The concept of triangulation is used widely within the mixed method evaluation literature, and focused initially on the idea that similar results from different research methods would enhance the validity of research findings . Subsequently, triangulation has also been conceptualised as a mechanism for producing a more complete or holistic picture of the phenomenon of interest . Denzin  identified a range of different triangulation strategies: data triangulation, using multiple sources of data; investigator triangulation, using varied observers; and theoretical triangulation, in which theories from multiple disciplines are used to broaden the interpretive framework of a study [19, 31]. While these different forms of triangulation are often promoted, it has been argued that insufficient attention has been paid to what triangulation means both epistemologically and at the level of methods, interpretation, and inference for individual studies [18, 31]. Further, triangulation is only one of a range of reasons for combining different methods – other reasons include complementarity (using results from one method to explain results from another), development (using results from one method to further the development of another) and expansion (using different methods for different elements of the research question so as to expand its depth) . While this 'fuzziness' is conceptually challenging, Erzberger and Kelle note that the different approaches to triangulation are helpful in identifying different options for drawing together results from different methods and that no single approach is appropriate for all types of integration .
When planning the evaluation, we believed that the mix of quantitative and qualitative methods selected and their triangulation would complement each other , provide a balance between breadth of data (a strength of the client survey) and depth of data (a strength of the client diaries and structured observations), and allow us to expand the depth of the research overall. Together these methods would also contribute to the generalisability of the findings [34, 35]. In practice, we found that this approach did help us to distill key implementation findings and principles . For example, the evaluation identified the need for the training of LHWs to include both bio-medical knowledge – a conclusion drawn from findings from the client survey – and ways of managing psychosocial barriers to treatment adherence – a conclusion derived from the results of the structured observations and diary-keeping. However, the range of methods that we selected and our approach to both data and investigator triangulation raised a number of challenges which we discuss below.
A limit to the multitude of methods?
Enthusiasm for multiple methods can easily turn into an overly ambitious evaluation that over-stretches its resources. Multi-method evaluations need considerable resources to collect, analyse and report data and also require that the research team include a wide range of skills and experience [20, 21]. Our research team had worked together for some time and were committed to the mixed methods paradigm . However, bringing together researchers from different methodological paradigms may be challenging for both team processes and data analysis . Our experience suggests that careful planning and agreement on the value and combination of methods is needed before embarking on an evaluation.
We also need to recognise that more effort is needed to plan and conduct mixed methods evaluations, compared to single method evaluations. Qualitative and quantitative research make different epistemological assumptions, and researchers have questioned whether the interpretivist and positivist paradigms are compatible at all , and the implications of this for evaluations that attempt to bring together qualitative and quantitative data. In this study, we took a pragmatic stance [9, 35, 38]: we accept that there are multiple realities that can be explored empirically and focused on understanding practical problems identified by our colleagues in practice settings, with the aim of providing useful knowledge. Guided by this approach, we saw it as important that the methods we used were complementary and helped to achieve the evaluation objectives, while taking available resources and time constraints into account. An evaluation with an array of sophisticated and sensitive data collection tools, but without adequate time and resources to implement these appropriately or to do justice to the emerging data, is unlikely to produce valid and trustworthy findings and may be less desirable than a well conducted single method evaluation. For example, the rich, in-depth longitudinal data gathered through methods such as diary keeping need to be traded off against the time needed to collect and analyse these data. Diary keeping may be most useful for issues that are sensitive or stigmatised, and have profound effects on people's daily lives. The in-depth data produced through this method can help understand changes in people's views and experiences over time. Diary keeping could also be considered for formative evaluations of novel interventions whose potential impacts are not well understood. However, it may not produce useful knowledge where research resources are very limited or where rapid results are needed.
One of the most challenging aspects of multi-method evaluation is the analysis of data from different methods and sources . Ideally, this process is iterative with preliminary findings and methodological insights from one method informing the application of the other methods. Data analysis needs to explore the results from each approach while making connections between these emerging groups of results, with a view to developing an integrated set of findings. Methods designed for applied research, such as framework analysis, may offer advantages as these allow data to be categorised and analysed in a structured manner [35, 39, 40]. Logic models are another analytic tool that can be helpful in drawing together findings from different methods to create hypotheses regarding how a process unfolds or how an intervention impacts on its intended recipients and is influenced by its delivery and wider context [41, 42].
An important practical consideration is whether there is sufficient time to provide timely and regular feedback to the commissioning agency and other stakeholders during the course of the evaluation [43, 44]. In our evaluation, the timeframe required by the funder meant that feedback of preliminary findings from each evaluation component was not feasible and only the findings from the client-survey were shared with stakeholders in a feedback meeting. All other results were jointly presented to stakeholders one month after completion of the evaluation. We therefore did not have opportunities to discuss all preliminary findings – a process that could have been useful in understanding each set of findings and also in making connections across the different sets of findings. While mixed method formative research can forefront the voices of different stakeholders, including service users and providers [38, 45], our experience raises questions of how and when to best engage with stakeholders regarding the findings of mixed method evaluations, so as to be able to draw in their perspectives, and how to present rich and textured mixed method findings to these groups and to other researchers.
Patton argues that programme evaluation is as much a creative process as it is rooted in sound and robust methodologies . It is this perspective that led us to experiment with less frequently used evaluation methods such as structured observations and diary keeping. We learnt valuable lessons through this experimentation – for example, we did not anticipate that the presence of the observer, who had the same ethnic and language background as the clients and LHWs, would affect clients to the extent that we felt their responses during the structured observations were partial or overly positive. In future evaluations we need to consider alternative strategies to address this problem. Similarly, we found the large volumes of data produced by diary keeping difficult to manage in a time-limited evaluation. However, we believe that the mix of methods led to useful knowledge overall – a key feature of the pragmatic stance to mixed method research  – and we learnt a number of valuable lessons, including on the many challenges of evaluating a community-based programme to support people living with stigmatised illnesses. An innovative and creative evaluation allows the evaluation team to be responsive to data collection opportunities in the field, such as our decision to record informal conversations during the time-and-motion study – a data collection element that was not planned initially. These changes of course need to be congruent with the evaluation protocol and ethics approvals.
New and innovative methods place the evaluation team on unfamiliar ground regarding what these methods will entail. For example, the diary-keeping fieldwork became emotionally stressful for the evaluator because of the intimate information shared by the participants. This highlights the importance of reflexivity and of support for both participants and evaluators. While empathy and immersion are important considerations when researching people's experiences of living with a health issue, and close relationships with participants and communities can help to obtain a holistic view of the programme evaluated, care should be taken to ensure that appropriate debriefing opportunities are available.
From the experiences described in this paper, we have distilled a number of suggestions that may help other researchers optimise the benefits of multiple, mixed-method evaluations (Table 7).
Formative evaluations are not a 'miracle cure' that offer definitive answers to programme implementation questions but rather their value lies in their iterative nature. In the evaluation discussed here, each sub-study, individually and combined, contributed to opening up the 'black box' of how and why this programme functioned as it did. Based on the lessons we learned from this evaluation, the answer to the question posed in the title is a definite 'Yes' – formative evaluation designs including multiple qualitative and quantitative methods hold distinct advantages over single method evaluations. However, their value is not in the number of methods used, but in how each method matches the evaluation questions.
The researchers would like to thank all the lay health workers, clinic staff, NGO management, in particular Prof. Harry Hausler, director of the participating NGO, and the health authorities' management, who willingly offered their time to support and participate in the study. We also wish to acknowledge the enthusiastic support we received during the study, especially from Dr. Karen Jennings and Judy Caldwell from the City of Cape Town, Department of Health, and from staff of the Western Cape Provincial Government Department of Health. Finally, we want to thank Yolisa Mtshizana who assisted in collecting data for the evaluation.
The National Department of Health, South Africa, partly funded the study. WO and SL are supported by funding from the South African Medical Research Council. SA is supported by funding from the University of Tampere and Karolinska Institutet.
WO, SL, and SA conceptualised the study. All authors contributed to refining the ideas, implementing the study and editing drafts.
All three authors have experience of programme evaluation in South African public health services. The authors have previously collaborated on programme evaluations using mixed methods evaluations.
Ethics approval for the evaluation was obtained from the South African Medical Research Council (EC09-028). All participants in each sub-study were given an information sheet on the study and signed a consent form.
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Amber Rose Voices Support for Hiddleswift: Taylor Is "F*cking Awesome"
Hiddleswift FTW.
By Peggy Truong
Now that you've had a few days to process Hollywood's hottest new romance, it's time to see how Amber Rose feels about the whole Hiddleswift saga. In a new interview with the Daily Beast, Amber says that yes, she's seen the ~*photos*~ of Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston hanging out/snogging/kissing, and she thinks Taylor is "fucking awesome." She also analyzes the authenticity of the photos by sharing some personal experience with something similar: "I was on a private beach in Maui — you literally had to drive three hours from the airport to get to this beach — and paparazzi still caught me. I saw it on TMZ the next day and I couldn't believe it. I thought that was a safe place, and it was not."
Elsewhere in the interview, Amber says that Taylor's dating life has not been receiving the best treatment in the public eye because she also happens to be female. "I love Taylor, for sure. Absolutely. And I feel like guys do that all the time — they break up and the next day they're with another girl and nobody really says anything." Amber also offered this explanation of why Taylor deserves a little more respect: "It is because it's unheard of, and she's acting very 'slutty' and for some reason needs time to 'let her pussy rest.' That's how people look at it, and it's just like, hell no! If I'm done, why do I have to sit in the house and be lonely?"
Follow Peggy on Twitter.
Peggy Truong Entertainment Writer Peggy is Cosmopolitan.com's entertainment writer, specializing in Leonardo DiCaprio, This Is Us, and the royals.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Grim tale of global shark declines
Please don't eat me
How do you prevent declines of species you cannot even see? This is (and has always been) the dilemma for fisheries because, well, humans don't live underwater. Even when we strap on a metal tank full of air and a pair of fins, we're still more or less like wounded astronauts peering through a narrow window of glass at the huge, largely empty, ocean space. It's little wonder then that we have a fairly crap system of estimating fish abundance, and an even worse track record of managing them sustainably.
But humans love to eat fish – the total world estimate of legal fisheries landings is something in the vicinity of 190 million tonnes in 2013, up from 18 million tonnes in 1950 (according to FAO). We're probably familiar with some of the losers of that massive harvest, with species like tunas, bill fishes and orange roughy making the news for catastrophic declines in abundance over the last 30-40 years. And we're not even talking about the estimated tragedy that is illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
Back in 1999, the FAO started to report that sharks – the new-ish target of many world fisheries resulting from the commercial extinction of many other fin fish fisheries – we're starting to take the hit. Once generally ignored by fishing industries, sharks soon became popular target species. Then in 2003, Julia Baum and colleagues famously (and somewhat controversially) sounded the alarm for sharks in the Gulf of Mexico by some claims of major and catastrophic declines of large, predatory sharks. While some of the subsequent to-ing and fro-ing in the literature challenged these claims, Baum's excellent work was ultimately vindicated.
Since then, more and more evidence that sharks are in trouble has surfaced, including the assessment of the reported (again, only legal) catch indicated heavy depletion of coastal sharks even by 1975, and the estimate that 25% of all shark and ray species have an elevated extinction risk, mainly resulting from overfishing. Now even the direct fisheries landings statistics are confirming this grim tale. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: chondrichthyans, declines, extinction, FAO, fisheries, fishing, management, rays, sharks
Categories : coasts, fish, fisheries, marine, ocean
National commitment to conservation brings biodiversity benefits
What makes some conservation endeavours successful where so many fail to protect biodiversity? Or, how long is a piece of string?
Yes, it's a difficult question because it's not just about the biology – such as resilience and area relationships – in fact, it's probably more about the socio-economic setting that will ultimately dictate how the biodiversity in any particular area fares in response to disturbance.
In the case of protected areas (that I'll just refer to as 'reserves' for the remainder of this post), there's been a lot of work done about the things that make them 'work' (or not) in terms of biodiversity preservation. Yes, we can measure investment, how much the community supports and is involved with the reserve, how much emphasis is put on enforcement, the types of management done within (and outside) of the reserves, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things can (and have to some extent) been correlated with indices of the fate of the biodiversity within reserves, such as rates and patterns of deforestation, the amount of illegal hunting, and the survival probability of particular taxa.
But the problem with these indices is that there are just indices – they probably do not encapsulate the overall 'health' of the biodiversity within a reserve (be that trends in the overall abundance of organisms, the resilience of the community as a whole to future disturbances, or the combined phylogenetic diversity of the ecosystem). This is because there are few long-term monitoring programmes of sufficient taxonomic and temporal breadth to summarise these components of complex ecosystems (i.e., ecology is complex). It's no real surprise, and even though we should put a lot more emphasis on targeted, efficient, long-term biodiversity monitoring inside and outside of all major biodiversity reserves, the cold, hard truth of it is that we'll never manage to get the required systems in place. Humanity just doesn't value it enough. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Bill Laurance, biodiversity, deforestation, forests, Ian Craigie, logging, management, national parks, Protected Areas, reserves, wealth
Categories : conservation, conservation biology, environmental Kuznets curve, fire, poaching, roads
Scientific conspiracies are impossible
We've all heard it somewhere before: "It's all just a big conspiracy and those bloody scientists are just trying to protect their funding sources."
Whether it's about climate change, pharmacology, genetically modified organisms or down-to-earth environmentalism, people who don't want to agree with a particular scientific finding often invoke the conspiracy argument.
There are three main reasons why conspiracies among scientists are impossible. First, most scientists are just not that organised, nor do they have the time to get together to plan such elaborate practical jokes on the public. We can barely keep our own shit together than try to construct a water-tight conspiracy. I've never met a scientist who would be capable of doing this, let alone who would want to.
But this doesn't necessarily prove my claim that it is 'impossible'. Most importantly, the idea that a conspiracy could form among scientists ignores one of the most fundamental components of scientific progress — dissension; and bloody hell, can we dissent! The scientific approach is one where successive lines of evidence testing hypotheses are eventually amassed into a concept, then perhaps a rule of thumb. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: conspiracy, hypothesis, hypothesis testing, Karl Popper, Multiple Working Hypotheses, science
Categories : science, scientific publishing
An appeal to extinction chronologists
Extinction is forever, right? Yes, it's true that once the last individual of a species dies (apart from insane notions that de-extinction will do anything to resurrect a species in perpetuity), the species is extinct. However, the answer can also be 'no' when you are limited by poor sampling. In other words, when you think something went extinct when in reality you just missed it.
Most of you are familiar with the concept of Lazarus1 species – when we've thought of something long extinct that suddenly gets re-discovered by a wandering naturalist or a wayward fisher. In paleontological (and modern conservation biological) terms, the problem is formally described as the 'Signor-Lipps' effect, named2 after two American palaeontologists, Phil Signor3 and Jere Lipps. It's a fairly simple concept, but it's unfortunately ignored in most palaeontological, and to a lesser extent, conservation studies.
The Signor-Lipps effect arises because the last (or first) evidence (fossil or sighting) of a species presence has a nearly zero chance of heralding its actual timing of extinction (or appearance). In paleontological terms, it's easy to see why. Fossilisation is in fact a nearly impossible phenomenon – all the right conditions have to be in place for a once-living biological organism to be fossilised: it either has to be buried quickly, in a place where nothing can decompose it (usually, an anoxic environment), and then turned to rock by the process of mineral replacement. It then has to resist transformation by not undergoing metamorphosis (e.g., vulcanism, extensive crushing, etc.). For more recent specimens, preservation can occur without the mineralisation process itself (e.g., bones or flesh in an anoxic bog). Then the bloody things have to be found by a diligent geologist or palaeontologist! In other words, the chances that any one organism is preserved as a fossil after it dies are extremely small. In more modern terms, individuals can go undetected if they are extremely rare or remote, such that sighting records alone are usually insufficient to establish the true timing of extinction. The dodo is a great example of this problem. Remember too that all this works in reverse – the first fossil or observation is very much unlikely to be the first time that the species was there. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: conservation biology, de-extinction, extinction, fossils, geochronology, geology, Lazarus species, mass extinctions, palaentology, Signor-Lipps effect
Categories : conservation, extinction, modelling


Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) announced on Wednesday that it has officially rolled out their App Center across the world. The news was confirmed by one of Facebook's public relations staff members on Twitter.
Facebook's App Center is where users can access all of their web and mobile based apps, including Pintrest, Words With Friends, Spotify, SongPop, Instagram, and many more. The App Center also lets users view the most popular apps and apps that their friends use.
Prior to this announcement, Facebook launched the App Center in other non-English speaking countries including France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Brazil, Taiwan, and Russia.
As with any high-profile internet company, Facebook's main focus is taking things global. By opening up their App Center to the whole world, everyone can combine their social life with their internet activities. These days, every company and website holds a significant presence on Facebook, and applications make it easier for consumers to interact.
In order to stay on top in the ever evolving technology market, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) must do everything they can to stay relevant. Apple set the standards with popular mobile apps that allow people to connect with others and get things done wherever they are. Most companies jumped on the bandwagon by creating their own versions of apps and app stores, Facebook was no exception. In an effort to reach more people who primarily use their smartphones to connect with others, spreading the app center throughout the world will make it easier for others to find what they want when they need it.
This move isn't just beneficial to consumers around the world, it's also beneficial to Facebook and other businesses. The more people discover the App Center, the more likely they are to use the apps. The apps take information from personal profiles in hopes to offer on-target advertisements. The more they can peddle out Apps, the more revenue they can potentially make.
Facebook users outside the United States make-up about 81% of their 955 million monthly active users and that number is climbing. Despite the rise, about half their income from last quarter's revenues come from advertisements geared toward users in the United States. That number could change if Facebook accrues more advertising contracts with companies in other countries. Hopefully, the worldwide launch of the app center will put Facebook back into the eyes of global marketers and propel them further back in the market.


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Homeward Bound into the Fourth Age
A shorter essay for a shorter chapter this week, as we head into Return of the King: Endgame. [Note: after writing this and going back to edit, I have to shamefully admit that my essay on an eight-page chapter is not, in fact, shorter than any of the others. Tolkien has ruined me.]
"Homeward Bound" works largely to set up our last two chapters: the unrest in the Shire and Frodo's fraught mental state. The languid, gentle melancholy of "Many Partings" hits some rocky ground, the slow slide in the Fourth Age demands some action and choice, and Gandalf fails to provide the professional courtesy of a two weeks' notice. Let's go back to Bree!
There Is No Real Going Back
"Many Partings" walks its characters along a reverse journey, retracing steps and coming across characters (and echoes) of their earlier adventures. It's a pleasant, if somewhat sad, trip. "Homeward Bound," in its opening pages, immediately inverts this story beat.
When they came to the Ford of Bruinen, [Frodo] had halted, and seemed loth to ride into the stream; and they noted that for a while his eyes appeared not to see them or things about him. All that day he was silent. It was the sixth of October.
The same thing happens to Frodo as they pass Weathertop: he refuses to look at the hill as they pass, draws his cloak closely about him as a storm blows in. Rather than finding comfort (or at least some bittersweet nostalgia) in familiar sights, Frodo is finding mostly pain and distress. Gandalf, as is his wont, notices. And he remarks that there are "some wounds that cannot be wholly cured." Frodo agrees:
"I fear that it may be so with mine," said Frodo. "There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?"
Gandalf doesn't answer him: at this point there's not really a helpful answer that he can give. Frodo feels better the next day, happy and cheerful. But this narrative inversion means there's a grittiness present from the start of "Homeward Bound," something caught in the gears of the previously smoothly-running Fourth Age. This is a good setup for the ending of our story on the personal level: poor Frodo has been shunted out of place by his experiences. He hasn't been fated for the long goodbye of the Galadriels and Gandalfs of the world; he can't seem to settle back into an active role in new experiences as we're about to see with Merry and Pippin and Sam. It's no coincidence the chapter ends with Frodo admitting that he feels like he's falling back into a dream. Everything feels familiar but distant, irreconcilable with this altered version of himself.
Trouble in Bree
This is a good set up for the broader world as well: it gets externalized beyond Frodo's own experiences as soon as the hobbits enter Bree. Everyone is carrying clubs and cudgels; The Prancing Pony is nearly empty. Barliman confirms the uncertainty:
"It's like a bit of the bad old times tales tell of, I say. It isn't safe on the road and nobody goes far, and folk lock up early. We have to keep watchers all around the fence and put a lot of men on the gates at night… there's been worse than robbers about. Wolves were howling round the fences last winter. And there's dark shapes in the woods, dreadful things that make the blood run cold."
He later confirms that, if rumors are true, things aren't going terribly well in The Shire, either. It's a different scale, but we have the same tendency as before: comfort (even sadness-tinged comfort) giving way to a sense of danger and challenge.
On one level, this seems so unfair. Pippin, deeply understandably, had assumed they had left trouble behind by this point. Poor hobbits! Just let them relax, Tolkien. It's been a very long year. But this is an important shift at the end of The Lord of the Rings, since this is a story of beginnings as well as endings. It's okay for Gandalf, Galadriel, and the Elves to coast a bit in their retirement, saying goodbye to the Third Age as they make their way slowly to the Sea. It's a bit of a passive look for them, but it's supposed to be. "My time is over," Gandalf tells the hobbits. "it is no longer my task to set things to rights, not to help folk to do so." There's just time for a bit of a farewell tour before the end.
Into the Fourth Age
But "Homeward Bound" shifts the focus away from this and looks squarely at the people who are going to begin the Fourth Age, and who have to make difficult choices and fight painful battles to make the world a good place to live in. This is clearest in Gandalf handing the reigns to the hobbits at the chapter's end:
I am not coming to the Shire. You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for… You will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you.
Barliman adds his support too, noting that their travels have changed them, these mail-bedecked hobbits who "look now like folk as can deal with troubles out of hand." We've talked a bit in the comments sections of previous chapters in Book VI about how Tolkien's view of Aragorn's reign stays largely aloof and hypothetical. There are few tricky or morally-fraught decisions; Aragorn is crowned, marries his immortal, beautiful elf-wife, and everything else seems to neatly fall into place. Yay!
"Homeward Bound" makes me more confident than I had been before that Tolkien was aware of this and was trying to address in the ways that he could. There is, frankly, no room at the end of The Lord of the Rings to establish the complexities of Middle-earth realpolitik in the Fourth Age. It would be weird! Given the story up to this point there simply is not room for it, in terms of tone, pacing, or theme. "The Scouring of the Shire," I think, works both as an important character and thematic moment for our hobbits, but also as a microcosm stand-in for the broader picture of a Fourth Age Middle-earth. You can see this in Gandalf's encouragement to Butterbur:
"Cheer up, Barliman! You have been on the edge of very great troubles, and I am only glad to hear that you have not been deeper in. But better times are coming. Maybe, better than you remember. The Rangers have returned. We came back with them. And there is a king again, Barliman. He will soon be turning his mind this way. Then the Greenway will be opened again, and his messengers will come north, and there will be comings and goings, and the evil things will be driven out of the wastelands. Indeed the waste in time will be waste no longer, and there will be people and fields where there was once wilderness."
Different things are coming, and they are going to require challenge and work. There will be setbacks and sadness. These stories exist—as clear by the story's name—beyond the scope of The Lord of the Rings. "Homeward Bound" and "The Scouring of the Shire" exist simply a small, contained glimpse of what's to come. It's a necessary capstone in a narrative universe where stories overlap and constantly spill into each other. After all, the Fellowship from the start was a mixture of past and present, young and old. Now half of them are picking up the mantle to continue the story forward. As Gandalf noted, after all, it's what they were trained for. "Homeward Bound" is a little chapter but an important. It shifts our focus most definitively from the Third Age to the Fourth; it shifts the tone from passive to active.
(Thematically this works very well and is important to the chapter. I'm glad Gandalf leaves [sorry, Gandalf]. But man, if I were a hobbit I would be so annoyed? Furious. Oh, your age is over, Gandalf? You have to bail to go talk to Bombadil, Gandalf? Two of us just walked to Mordor for you, Gandalf).
The lede has been buried: Bill the Pony is ALIVE AND HAPPY
"[Bombadil] is a moss-gatherer, and I have been a stone doomed to rolling. But my rolling days are ending, and now we shall have much to say to one another." I was curious about what Gandalf and Tom Bombadil chatted about as Gandalf abandons the poor hobbits to fend for themselves in the midst of a rural uprising. The internet was, too! Most people seemed to agree it'd just be a nice, long nostalgia-fest before the Fourth Age fully takes hold, with both parties being various levels of drunk and/or high. But I did like one person's suggestion that Bombadil would have refused to talk about anything but Goldberry or lilies. Canon.
"Well, this is the nicest chat I've had in a month of Mondays." A good phrase. It was spoken on October 28th so this assertion carries some serious weight.
Barliman's face being "a study in wonder" at discovery that the shifty dude who skulked around his bar a year or so back is now KING OF THE WORLD is a nice moment. A long way since Bree where you did not like the look of me, indeed.
Frodo has a rough go of things this chapter but by far the most distressing thing that happens to him is a bar full of strangers asking him if he has finished writing his book yet. Worth it though, as it results in one of the funniest Tolkien beats in a while: "He promised to deal with the amazing events at Bree, and so give a bit of interest to a book that appeared likely to treat mostly of the remote and less important affairs away south. Then one of the younger folk called for a song. But at that a hush fell and he was frowned down, and the call was not repeated." Long memories in Bree.
Despite the fact that I've been keeping track of time I was a little startled that a year has passed in book-time but three-years have passed in real time? What have I done with myself? I have not destroyed any jewelry in a volcano. I have not joined the personal guard of any I have not entered into a mutual friendship with a tree. It's going to be a challenging New Years that requires reflection. But really, all of you? This year? Be the Fourth Age you wanna see in the world.
Prose Prize: Often they lingered in the fair woodlands where the leaves were red and yellow in the autumn sun. At length they came to Weathertop; and it was then drawing towards evening and the shadow of the hill lay dark on the road. Then Frodo begged them to hasten, and he would not look towards the hill, but rode through its shadow with head bowed and cloak drawn close about him. That night the weather changed, and a wind came from the West laden with rain, and it blew loud and chill, and the yellow leaves whirled like birds in the air. Poor Frodo.
Next Week: Celebrate Boxing Day with me as we see the Shire get, just, really scoured.
Art Credits: Fan art for this chapter doesn't seem to exist! Have some deja vu instead. Images, in order of appearance, are courtesy of Ted Nasmith, Jian Guo, and erzsebet-beast.
In this article:Featured, Lord of the Rings, lotr, lotr reread, tolkien, tolkien re-read
The Scouring of the Shire
Creator Corner: Interview with Fantasy Author K Arsenault Rivera
Katie spends her days reading about medieval history and her evenings wondering if it's too late to drop out of graduate school and become an astronaut.


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T cells. KIRs recognize polymorphic human HLA class I molecules and have inhibitory and activation functions. Binding of CD158d to its receptor HLA-G leads to the inhibition of the cytolytic NK cell function.
Additional information: Clone REA768 displays negligible binding to Fc receptors.


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Consideration in Contracts: Everything You Need to Know
Consideration in contracts refers to the benefit each party receives in exchange for what it gives up in the contract. It is a vital element in a contract. 3 min read
1. Consideration in Contracts
2. Essential Elements of Consideration
3. Types of Consideration
4. Consideration Need Not Be Monetary
5. Disproportionate Consideration
6. Is It Mandatory to Mention the Word 'Consideration'?
7. What Happens When a Contract Lacks Consideration?
8. Failure to Provide Consideration
Updated November 17, 2020:
Consideration in Contracts
Consideration in contracts refers to the benefit each party receives in exchange for what it gives up in the contract. It is a vital element that must be present in a contract in order to make it legally binding on the parties. A contract, whether oral or in writing, becomes invalid if there is no consideration involved.
Essential Elements of Consideration
In order to form a valid contract, consideration must meet the following conditions:
It must be something worth bargaining for.
It must benefit all the parties to the contract.
It must be something of value.
Types of Consideration
There are two types of consideration:
Consideration in a bilateral contract involves exchanging a promise for a promise.
Consideration in a unilateral contract involves one party making a promise and the other party doing something in return.
Consideration Need Not Be Monetary
Consideration can be in the form of money, property, promise, services, or something else. It can be something as simple as a promise to do or not to do something. For example, if you enter into a contract with your neighbor wherein he agrees not to sue you for the damage you caused to his property, and in return, you agree to pay him a sum of $800, then the amount of $800 is the consideration your neighbor gets, whereas his promise to not sue you is the consideration you get from the contract.
Disproportionate Consideration
Consideration can be as big or small as the parties mutually agree to exchange between themselves. For example, when you go to buy a dress, it's between you and the seller to agree upon the price. When a valid consideration is present, courts rarely interfere to decide whether the deal is unfair or disproportionate. However, if a party is tricked into an unfair deal by hiding some important information or otherwise acting in bad faith, then it can affect the legal validity of the contract.
Is It Mandatory to Mention the Word 'Consideration'?
Most contracts contain a line or two to the effect that a valid and sufficient consideration forms the basis of the contract. However, just mentioning something in the contract does not prove the existence of valid consideration. Likewise, a consideration does not become invalid if it doesn't find a mention in the contract. No
What Happens When a Contract Lacks Consideration?
If there is no consideration present in a contract, the contract becomes invalid, and the courts may refuse to enforce the contract. Sometimes, a contract may lack consideration though it may seem at the surface that the parties are exchanging something of value.
Following are some of the scenarios where there is no valid consideration involved:
When a party promises to perform something he or she was already legally bound to perform. For example, when a policeman promises to catch the thief.
When the consideration is more of a gift and does not require bargaining or mutual agreement between the parties. For example, when a mother creates a legal document promising to buy her son a car if he graduates with good marks.
When a party promises to give something in exchange for some "past consideration" by the other party.
When the promise to do something is illusory. For example, when a mango juice company enters into a contract with a farmer, saying that the company will buy all its mango requirements from the farmer, and the farmer can sell to the company as many mangoes as he wants, then the consideration given by the farmer is illusory since he is not legally bound by the contract to sell the mangoes to the company.
Failure to Provide Consideration
If a party fails to provide the promised consideration, the other party can cancel the contract. The defaulting party can also be sued for damages or specific performance.
The following instances are tantamount to failure of consideration:
When the provided consideration is worth less than promised.
When the provided consideration is damaged or destroyed.
When the performance is not carried out as promised or expected; for example, when a mechanic does not repair a car properly.
It is worth noting that a promise to do something illegal or immoral does not serve as a valid consideration.
If you need help with consideration in contracts, you can post your legal need on UpCounsel's marketplace. UpCounsel accepts only the top 5 percent of lawyers to its site. Lawyers on UpCounsel come from law schools such as Harvard Law and Yale Law and average 14 years of legal experience, including work with or on behalf of companies like Google, Menlo Ventures, and Airbnb.
Why Is Consideration Important? Everything You Need to Know
Invalid Consideration
Elements of Consideration in Business Law
Without Consideration
Consideration Is an Essential Element in Contract
Contract Consideration
Consideration Law
Definition of Consideration in Contract Law
Why is Consideration Important in a Contract?
Consideration Notes: Everything You Need To Know
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Nov 29, 2018	Bilal Khan	-
China's Z-10ME Promises Significant Capability Gains
At Airshow China 2018, which took place in November in Zhuhai, Guangdong, AVIC (the Aviation Industry Corporation of China) officially unveiled the Z-10ME, an improved variant of Changhe Aircraft Industries Corporation's (CAIC) Z-10 attack helicopter.
Incorporating a wide-array of improvements in its onboard electronics suite, weapons compatibility and to the airframe, AVIC is actively marketing the Z-10ME for export. Thus far, three Z-10s were extensively tested by the Pakistan Army Aviation Corps (PAA) in 2015 and 2016.
According to AVIC (via Shephard Media), the Z-10ME incorporates "sand filters for the engines, infrared suppressors, crash-resistant seats for pilots and bullet-resistant armour for the cockpit."[1] In other words, increasing survivability and pilot/personnel-protection was a key impetus to improving the Z-10.
However, 'iterative' would understate the intended impact of these improvements. Besides adding to the Z-10's defensive characteristics, the Z-10ME also brings new offensive capabilities as well.
These capabilities include compatibility with the CM-501XA miniature cruise missile, ET60 324 mm anti-submarine warfare (ASW) torpedo, and SW6 air-launched drone.[2] Like the Z-10ME, AVIC is marketing each of these munitions for export.[3] AVIC is also marketing HJ-10 and TL-4 anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM).[4]
In 2016, Quwa noted that the preceding Z-10 variant appeared underpowered for its apparent maximum take-off weight (MTOW) of 6,000 kg – it relied on the 956 kW WZ9 turboshaft engine.[5] Based on officially available information (via Shephard Media), it is unclear if AVIC/CAIC changed the engine.[6] However, some reports state that a 1,200 kW engine may have been installed, but this cannot be confirmed.[7]
There were no reports of the Z-10ME receiving a millimeter wave radar (mmW) either. If equipped with an mmW radar, the Z-10ME could independently target moving ground targets and, in turn, engage them with an active radar-guided air-to-ground missile (AGM), i.e., true fire-and-forget.
However, AVIC has access to both solutions — i.e., 1,200+ kW turboshaft engine and mmW radar – through programs such as the WZ16 and mmW radar suite for the Z-19-armed scout helicopter, respectively.
Thus, it would not be surprising if both solutions materialize in the coming years, but it is unclear if the Z-10ME will leverage them. On the other hand, the Z-10ME demonstrates AVIC's willingness to upgrade the platform, and in relatively short-order. In fact, as its original Z-10s age, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) itself might have incentive to see a significantly improved variant emerge.
The hypotheticals aside, one should not understate the value AVIC has brought to the platform via the Z-10ME. The defensibility aspect alone spans across three key areas: (1) desert operations, (2) defensibility against infrared-guided missiles and (3) pilot/personnel protection and survivability.
The Z-10ME's engine intakes are equipped with sand filters. The intent is to position the Z-10ME as a full solution for desert operations. While observers have noted, and rightfully so, that AVIC will use this in its commercial efforts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Sub-Saharan Africa, a potential push to the Pakistani market should not be dismissed, nor should MENA be viewed as a likely candidate.
Firstly, the MENA market has largely settled on US-built attack helicopters, notably the Boeing AH-64D/E and, in Bahrain, the Bell Helicopter AH-1Z Viper. While AVIC has built a profitable niche in MENA with its unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) line – which can be attributed to the fact that the US was not forthcoming in selling its Predator or Reaper-lines – it is not doing as well with its other aircraft…
End of Excerpt (630/1,452 words]
The full article is available to Quwa Premium subscribers here.
[1] Gordon Arthur. "Zhuhai Air Show 2018: Z-10ME attack helicopter breaks cover." Shephard Media. 07 November 2018. URL: https://www.shephardmedia.com/news/defence-helicopter/zhuhai-air-show-2018-z-10me-attack-helicopter-brea/ (Last Accessed: 27 November 2018).
[2] Chen Chuanren. "China's Z-10ME Showcased with Increased Capabilities." AIN Online. 13 November 2018. URL: https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2018-11-13/chinas-z-10me-showcased-increased-capabilities (Last Accessed: 27 November 2018).
[5] Gordon Arthur. Shephard Media. November 2018.
[7] Chen Chuanren. AIN Online. November 2018.


Paddy McGuinness' wife Christine has shed light on what life is like with the comedian by sharing a hilarious video of him doing some questionable rapping.
The Real Housewives of Cheshire star branded her hubby "embarrassing" as he attempted to rap in their car on the school run.
Paddy, 45, seemed to be enjoying himself as he pointed to the camera and sang along to Seann Paul hit Boasty.
But 31-year-old Christine didn't look too impressed!
She captioned the Instagram video with: "He's home!!! ."
She added: "#SendHelp #WelcomeBack #EmbarrassingDad."
Cool parents picking their kids up from school!
Nodding his head up and down, and yelling the likes of "Remix ting!", Paddy joked in the clip: "Cool parents picking their kids up from school!"
Christine then decided to get out of the car and leave Paddy to it.
"Where are you going? You're missing out on the cool tunes," he called out to her.
Alone in the car, Paddy added: "I don't see what the problem is. Everyone's gone..."
Christine's fans joked that they felt sorry for her after Paddy's "embarrassing" episode.
"Omg @mrscmcguinness you deserve an award , never mind the hubby  #keepinghercool," wrote one follower.
Another jested: "I feel sorry for you and the kids christine ."
A third joked: "Is there no day care for Paddy??."
Dad rapping or not, Christine was no doubt happy to be doing the school run with Paddy.
It's rare to see the couple collecting their kids from school together as Paddy is often so busy with work.
They have five-year-old twins Penelope and Leo, as well as two-year-old daughter Felicity.
The former model recently admitted she sometimes feels like a "single parent" when the presenter is working away.


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Home > Alternative > All That Echoes
All That Echoes
Genre(s): Adult Contemporary, Vocal, Classical Crossover, Vocal Pop, Classical Pop
Record label: Reprise
Buy All That Echoes from Amazon
Album Review: All That Echoes by Josh Groban
Excellent, Based on 4 Critics
AllMusic - 80
Vocalist Josh Groban's sixth studio album, 2013's All That Echoes, features more of the crossover classical music that has become his trademark, while pushing further than ever toward the pop end of the spectrum. This is largely due to producer Rob Cavallo (Green Day, Goo Goo Dolls, Paramore), who frames Groban's burnished croon in sweeping alt-rock arrangements that layer atmospheric guitar lines against grand orchestral segments. It also doesn't hurt that with every album, Groban has garnered more co-writing credits, adding to the intimate and personal vibe of All That Echoes.
American Songwriter - 80
Josh GrobanAll That Echoes(Reprise)Rating: 4 stars (out of 5) Although rock and Josh Groban have rarely, if ever, been used in a sentence together, All That Echoes is a rewarding fusion of pop, rock, and classical music theories. With the assistance of veteran producer Rob Cavallo (Green Day, My Chemical Romance) manning the board for his latest and first release since 2010, Groban delivers his biggest sounding and most significant set. Groban's sixth album finds the operatic pop star co-writing the lion's share of the album's material himself, while stepping out of his comfort zone and blurring the edges of his usual musical fare.
Opinion: Excellent
The LA singer's voice remains an undeniably rich and powerful instrument. Nick Levine 2013 It's tempting to dismiss Josh Groban as yet another classical crossover villain: a kind of one-man Il Divo. After all, it was his version of You Raise Me Up that Westlife copied and turned into an X Factor favourite. Trouble is, the LA-born singer comes across very well in interviews, displaying a playful sense of humour that's not present in his music.
MY BLOODY VALENTINE "m b v". (mybloodyvalentine.org).
'All That Echoes'
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We prepare our Strategic Communication students for multifaceted careers in public relations, corporate communications and strategic messaging. They are required to develop solid journalistic skills, including reporting, writing and news judgment. They learn to conduct reliable research, to function as professional spokespeople, to develop public relations campaigns and to build strong corporate and community relationships.
* Choose ONE of the following: APS 101 Weather and Climate, APS 102 Natural Disasters, APS 105 Elements of Astronomy, APS 106 Astronomy of Stars and Galaxies, BIO 101 Nature of Life, BIO 103 General Biology, CHE 101 General Chemistry, SCI 102 Introduction to Physical Sciences, SCI 104 Introduction to Physical Sciences (Lab attached), SCI 203 Introduction to Nanoscience, MES 110 Earth & Ocean Systems, MES 130 Introduction to Environmental Science.
** Choose ONE of the following: JAC 403 Media Entrepreneurship, JAC 406 Media Management, JAC 407 Media Criticism, JAC 408 American Media History, JAC 425 Crisis Communication, JAC 450 Special Topics, JAC 452 Int'l Journalism & Communications, JAC 453 Ethnic and Alternative Media, JAC 454 Civil Rights Era and the Media.


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It appears that design instructors will have options beyond the film Helvetica to share with their students (not that we don't appreciate the documentary dedicated to the world's most famous typeface). With the release of the documentary The Visual Language of Herbert Matter earlier this year,and now the up-and-coming movie Linotype: The Film, it appears that the history of the graphic design industry is getting some reasonable coverage in the form of documentary film making. Yes… this is a design nerd alert!
"Linotype: The Film is a feature-length documentary film centered around the Linotype typecasting machine invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1886. Called the 'Eighth Wonder of the World' by Thomas Edison, the Linotype revolutionized printing and society, but very few people know about the inventor or his fascinating machine.
With a healthy obsession with magazines and publication design, I have an appreciation for the undeniable skills and patience needed for linotype operators to tackle typesetting, so I'm thinking this film will be worth my time.


The Australian Plant Name Index (APNI) is an online database of all published names of Australian vascular plants. It covers all names, whether current names, synonyms or invalid names. It includes bibliographic and typification details, information from the Australian Plant Census including distribution by state, links to other resources such as specimen collection maps and plant photographs, and the facility for notes and comments on other aspects.
Originally the brainchild of Nancy Tyson Burbidge, it began as a four-volume printed work consisting of 3,055 pages, and containing over 60,000 plant names. Compiled by Arthur Chapman, it was part of the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS). In 1991 it was made available as an online database, and handed over to the Australian National Botanic Gardens. Two years later, responsibility for its maintenance was given to the newly formed Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research.
Recognised by Australian herbaria as the authoritative source for Australian plant nomenclature, it is the core component of Australia's Virtual Herbarium, a collaborative project with A$10 million funding, aimed at providing integrated online access to the data and specimen collections of Australia's major herbaria.
What's Its Name (WIN), a less powerful query interface that delivers concise results, augmented with automatic (and not always correct) inference as to the currency.
^ "About the Index: Data Sources: Geographical and historical coverage: Australian Plant Name Index". International Plant Name Index. Retrieved 21 November 2013.
^ Croft, J.; Cross, N.; Hinchcliffe, S.; Lughadha, E. Nic; Stevens, P. F.; West, J. G.; Whitbread, G. (May 1999). "Plant Names for the 21st Century: The International Plant Names Index, a Distributed Data Source of General Accessibility". Taxon. 48 (2): 317–324. doi:10.2307/1224436. ISSN 0040-0262. JSTOR 1224436.
^ Lughadha, Eimear Nic (29 April 2004). "Towards a working list of all known plant species". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences. 359 (1444): 681–687. doi:10.1098/rstb.2003.1446. ISSN 0962-8436. PMC 1693359. PMID 15253353. Retrieved 3 March 2017.
"Australian Plant Name Index". Archived from the original on 3 September 2007. Retrieved 2007-09-09.
"The Australian Plant Name Index: an on-line resource of Australian plant names, and What's Its Name ?". Archived from the original on 3 September 2007. Retrieved 9 September 2007.
Chapman, Arthur (1991). Australian Plant Name Index (Australian Flora and Fauna Series 12—15). Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.
Official Australian Plant Name Index (APNI) website — full detail search.
The Australian National Botanic Gardens are located in Canberra and are administered by the Australian Governments Department of the Environment and Heritage. The botanic gardens are the largest living collection of native Australian flora, the gardens maintains a wide variety of botanical resources for researchers and cultivates native plants threatened in the wild. When Canberra was being planned in the 1930s, the establishment of the gardens was recommended in a report in 1933 by the Advisory Council of Federal Capital Territory, in 1935, The Dickson Report set forth a framework for their development. A large site for the gardens was set aside on Black Mountain, in September 1949, the Ceremonial planting of first trees by Prime Minister Ben Chifley and Director of Kew Gardens, Sir Edward Salisbury took place. Development of the site and collection progressed and the Gardens were officially opened in October 1970 by Prime Minister John Gorton, the Gardens has tenure over 90 hectares on Black Mountain.
About 40 hectares are currently developed as the Botanic Gardens, plans for the development of the remaining land are on hold until funds are available. The gardens is organised in sections, plants are grouped by shared taxonomy or are presented in ecological groupings that exist in nature. More than 5,500 species are cultivated, displays include, Rainforest Gully, featuring plants for the rainforests of Eastern Australia. Rock Garden, a display of plants occur in habitats from the desert to alpine areas. Sydney Region Flora, a display of the divers flora endemic to the formations of the Sydney basin. Mallee Plants, the mallees is the given to multi-stemmed eucalypts. Banksias and grevilleas Callistemon and Melaleuca The Eucalypt Lawn, wattles The Australian National Herbarium is held on site at the National Botanic Gardens. The Herbarium houses the largest collection of pressed, dried plant specimens in Australia, the Herbarium is operated jointly with the CSIRO as part of a joint research facility, the Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research.
Nancy Tyson Burbidge AO was an Australian systemic botanist and herbarium curator. Burbidge was born in Cleckheaton, her father, William Burbidge, was an Anglican clergyman and she was educated at Katanning Church of England Girls School – founded by her mother Nancy Eleanor. She completed her schooling in 1922 when she graduated from Bunbury High School and she completed her BSc in 1937, and afterwards received a prize to travel to England where she spent 18 months at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. While at Kew she worked on a revision of the Australian grass genus Enneapogon, when Nancy returned to Australia she continued her study of Australian plants through the University of Western Australia, completing her MSc. in 1945. In 1943 she was appointed assistant agronomist at the Waite Agricultural Research Institute in Adelaide and she was appointed to the new position of systematic botanist at the CSIRO Division of Plant Industry, Canberra in 1946. She wrote Key to the South Australian species of Eucalyptus LHér.
but had not specialised on the genus and she edited Australasian Herbarium News until her until 1953, when she took a years leave to be the Australian Botanical Liaison Officer at the Kew Gardens herbarium. While at Kew she photographed and indexed type specimens of Australian plants, when she returned to Australia in 1954 she began a very productive period of her career. Her Dictionary of Australian Plant Genera was published in 1963, and she completed studies of the plant groups Nicotiana, many of her publications included her own drawings. After resigning her position as curator of the herbarium she went on to be involved in the development of the Flora of Australia series. In addition to her books, she wrote over 50 papers on phytogeography, botanical history. Burbidge was interested in conservation and she was a founding member of the National Parks Association of the Australian Capital Territory in 1960, and twice served as its president. She was prominent in the lobby for the establishment of parks in the ACT including Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and Namadgi National Park.
A herbarium is a collection of preserved plant specimens and associated data used for scientific study. The term can refer to the building or room where the specimens are housed. The specimens in a herbarium are used as reference material in describing plant taxa. The same term is used in mycology to describe an equivalent collection of preserved fungi. A xylarium is a herbarium specialising in specimens of wood, the term hortorium has occasionally been applied to a herbarium specialising in preserving material of horticultural origin. During the drying process the specimens are retained within their flimsies at all times to minimise damage, for some plants it may prove helpful to allow the fresh specimen to wilt slightly before being arranged for the press. The sheet is placed in a protective case. As a precaution against insect attack, the plant is frozen or poisoned. Certain groups of plants are soft, bulky, or otherwise not amenable to drying and mounting on sheets, for these plants, other methods of preparation and storage may be used.
For example, conifer cones and palm fronds may be stored in labelled boxes, representative flowers or fruits may be pickled in formaldehyde to preserve their three-dimensional structure. Small specimens, such as mosses and lichens, are often air-dried and packaged in paper envelopes. No matter the method of preservation, detailed information on where and when the plant was collected, habitat and the name of the collector is usually included. The value of a herbarium is much enhanced by the possession of "types", that is and it is rich in types of Australian plants from the collections of Sir Joseph Banks and Robert Brown, and contains in addition many valuable modern collections. Most herbaria utilize a system of organizing their specimens into herbarium cases. Specimen sheets are stacked in groups by the species to which they belong, groups of species folders are placed together into larger, heavier folders by genus. The genus folders are sorted by taxonomic family according to the standard selected for use by the herbarium.
Botanical nomenclature is the formal, scientific naming of plants. It is related to, but distinct from taxonomy, plant taxonomy is concerned with grouping and classifying plants, botanical nomenclature provides names for the results of this process. The starting point for botanical nomenclature is Linnaeus Species Plantarum of 1753. Botanical nomenclature is governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae and plants, fossil plants are covered by the code of nomenclature. Botanical nomenclature has a history, going back beyond the period when Latin was the scientific language throughout Europe, to Theophrastus, Dioscorides. Many of these works have come down to us in Latin translations, the principal Latin writer on botany was Pliny the Elder. From Mediaeval times, Latin became the scientific language in Europe. Most written plant knowledge was the property of monks, particularly Benedictine, and it would require the invention of the printing press to make such information more widely available.
Leonhart Fuchs, a German physician and botanist is often considered the originator of Latin names for the increasing number of plants known to science. For instance he coined the name Digitalis in his De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes, a key event was Linnaeus' adoption of binomial names for plant species in his Species Plantarum. In the nineteenth century it became clear that there was a need for rules to govern scientific nomenclature. These were published in more sophisticated editions. For plants, key dates are 1867 and 1906, the most recent is the Melbourne Code, adopted in 2011. Another development was the insight into the delimitation of the concept of plant, gradually more and more groups of organisms are being recognised as being independent of plants. Nevertheless, the names of most of these organisms are governed by the. Some protists that do not fit easily into either plant or animal categories are treated under either or both of the ICN and the ICZN, a separate Code was adopted to govern the nomenclature of Bacteria, the International Code of Nomenclature of Bacteria.
A large herbarium may have hundreds of cases filled with specimens.