Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Is It Meaningless To Talk About 'The Internet'?, Lelia Rosalind Green

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper suggests that there is no longer any fixed meaning to the term 'Internet'. Instead, the Internet is created anew in the hands of each individual user and reflects their prioritie!i and interests. At the same time, the dynamism of Internet innovation and development is such that a burgeoning range of options has become available, allowing Internet users to customise and create their online environment to approxima.te a personal manifestation of what we might call, in a generic sense, 'their Internet'. In part, this shift has been reflected in something as mundane as the everyday usage of the word. …

The Australian School Libraries Research Project : A Snapshot Of Australian School Libraries, Report 1, Barbara Combes

Research outputs pre 2011

No abstract provided.

Perception Of Drought Hazard And Its Sociological Impacts In South-Central Nebraska, Donna L. Woudenberg, Donald A. Wilhite, Michael Hayes

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The lion's share of financial losses caused by drought is shouldered by crop and livestock producers. Producers' perceptions of and responses to drought were studied in the mid-1960s, the mid-1980s, and again in this study. Direct and indirect impacts are experienced by nonfarm businesses, communities, and individuals as well; some of those impacts have not been well researched and were integral to this project. Interviews with crop producers, livestock producers, and community members were conducted in Frontier County, NE, in late summer 2006. Producers are very perceptive of the drought hazard, a result found in the two previous studies. Adoption …

Review Of The Grasslands Of The United States: An Environmental History. By James E. Sherow, Francis Moul

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Environmental history is a fairly new and complex method of study. It is, according to historian Richard White, the history of consequences of human actions on the environment, and the reciprocal consequences of an altered nature on human society. This interaction thus combines natural history with social, economic, and political history, along with many more subspecies of study.

James Sherow's environmental history of America's grasslands is quite welcome. Although grass covers much of the earth's surface (12 billion of29 billion acres), it may be the least studied or popularized of plants. The National Grasslands of the U.S. are among the …

Stated Preferences For Ecotourism Alternatives On Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation, Robert R. Hearne, Sheldon Tuscherer

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Despite favorable locations and the potential for economic development, Native American tribes have not developed their ecotourism markets substantially. In this paper we present a choice experiments analysis of potential tourists' and local residents' preferences for alternative ecotourism development scenarios for the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation. The choice experiments' elicitation featured attributes of both cultural and nature-based tourist attractions. Survey results demonstrated that visitors interviewed at powwows had significantly different preferences from those interviewed at local tourist attractions. Results from all samples showed positive preferences toward an amphitheater, a nature trail, and a bison meal, and no preference toward …

News And Notes

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

CONFERENCES

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Book Review: America: Our Next Chapter: Tough Questions, Straight Answers By Chuck Hagel With Peter Kaminsk, Charlyne Berens

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

In America: Our Next Chapter, Hagel presents his take on where the nation stands and where he thinks it is-and should be-headed. The volume reflects his interest in history, his Nebraska heritage, and the insider knowledge he's gained as a member of the Senate and its Foreign Relations Committee. More than half the book addresses international relations and U.S. foreign policy, one of Hagel's longtime and most intense interests. It criticizes America's invasion of Iraq and the way the Bush administration handled the war. Hagel voted for the resolution authorizing the invasion but writes that the president and his …

Book Review: Twilight Of The Texas Democrats: The 1978 Governor's Race By Kenneth Bridges, Sean P. Cunningham

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The political earth shook in 1978 when, for the first time since Reconstruction, a Republican won Texas's most coveted electoral prize, the governorship. In his new book, Twilight of the Texas Democrats, historian Kenneth Bridges provides what for years to come will be undoubtedly the most well-written and comprehensive account of this critical moment. Bridges's book is a fast-paced, traditional political narrative. Though the author briefly contextualizes the political culture of the late 1970s by retracing Texas history from the Civil War to the modern era, the book's primary focus and major characters are the candidates and campaign managers …

Book Review: Storm Warning: The Story Of A Killer Tornado By Nancy Mathis, Charles A. Doswell Iii

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

As a storm chaser and meteorologist myself, I admit my expectations for this book by an "outsider" were relatively low. For the most part, however, Mathis has gotten it right, evidently as a result of extensive research on her part.

The book alternates in a somewhat erratic fashion between tornado survivor anecdotes and narrative about the events of May 3, 1999, and the science behind those events. From a purely storytelling viewpoint, I find this alternation of topics somewhat distracting, though others might find it entertaining. "This book," the author says in her introduction, "is the life story of one …

Book Review: Policing The Wild North-West: A Sociological Study Of The Provincial Police In Alberta And Saskatchewan, 1905-32. By Zhiqiu Lin, Andrew R. Graybill

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

In the end, however, many scholars will find Policing the Wild North-West to be of limited use. While Lin chronicles some important sociological trends on the prairies during the early period of full provincial status (and the extensive graphs, tables, and appendices are testament to his prodigious research), his book is so narrowly drawn that it does not serve adequately as a window onto larger questions concerning the Canadian nation or even the broader western region during the interwar period.

Book Review: The Persons Case: The Origins And Legacy Of The Fight For Legal Personhood By Robert I. Sharpe And Patricia I. Mcmahon, Jennifer Koshan

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Edwards v. Attorney General of Canada ("the Persons case") is a landmark Canadian legal decision. By petition of the Famous Five, this case determined in 1929 that women were "persons" qualified to be appointed to the Senate, and it coined the "living tree" metaphor to command a progressive approach to constitutional interpretation in Canada. Justice Robert Sharpe of the Ontario Court of Appeal and Toronto-based lawyer Patricia McMahon illuminate the rich connections of the Famous Five and other figures in the case to Alberta and Canadian law and politics and go on to evaluate the case's modern legacy.

Hrests: An Html Microformat For Describing Restful Web Services, Jacek Kopecky, Karthik Gomadam, Tomas Vitvar

Kno.e.sis Publications

The Web 2.0 wave brings, among other aspects, the Programmable Web: increasing numbers of Web sites provide machine-oriented APIs and Web services. However, most APIs are only described with text in HTML documents. The lack of machine-readable API descriptions affects the feasibility of tool support for developers who use these services. We propose a microformat called hRESTS (HTML for RESTful Services) for machine-readable descriptions of Web APIs, backed by a simple service model. The hRESTS microformat describes main aspects of services, such as operations, inputs and outputs. We also present two extensions of hRESTS: SA-REST, which captures the facets of …

Targeted Content Delivery For Social Media Content, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Kamal Baid, Amit P. Sheth, Shaojun Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

Spotting contextually relevant keywords is fundamental to effective content suggestions on the Web. In this regard, misspellings, entity variations and off-topic discussions in content from Social Media pose unique challenges. Here, we present an algorithm that assists content delivery systems by identifying contextually relevant keywords and eliminating off-topic keywords. A preliminary user study over data from MySpace and Facebook clearly suggests the usefulness of our work in delivering more targeted content suggestions.

Services Mashups: The New Generation Of Web Applications, Djamal Benslimane, Schahram Dustdar, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web services are becoming a major technology for deploying automated interactions between distributed and heterogeneous applications, and for connecting business processes. Service mashups indicate a way to create new Web applications by combining existing Web resources utilizing data and Web APIs. They facilitate the design and development of novel and modern Web applications based on easy-to-accomplish end-user service compositions.

Semantic Sensor Web, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Unsupervised Discovery Of Compound Entities For Relationship Extraction, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Pablo N. Mendes, Shaojun Wang, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper we investigate unsupervised population of a biomedical ontology via information extraction from biomedical literature. Relationships in text seldom connect simple entities. We therefore focus on identifying compound entities rather than mentions of simple entities. We present a method based on rules over grammatical dependency structures for unsupervised segmentation of sentences into compound entities and relationships. We complement the rule-based approach with a statistical component that prunes structures with low information content, thereby reducing false positives in the prediction of compound entities, their constituents and relationships. The extraction is manually evaluated with respect to the UMLS Semantic Network …

Ontology Driven Semantic Provenance For Heterogeneous Bionomics Experimental Data, Satya S. Sahoo, Michael L. Raymer, Cory Andrew Henson, Amit P. Sheth, William S. York

Kno.e.sis Publications

Scientific experimental data generated by all the bionomic technologies is characterized by heterogeneity in its representation formats, constituents, and generation processes and, therefore, also in its usage. Using the proteomics domain we demonstrate the important role of provenance information o manage, interpret and analyze experimental data. We present a novel approach that employs an ontology as a knowledge model to automatically create semantic provenance information for high-throughput mass spectrometry (MS) data in the glycoproteomics domain. The Semantic Provenance Annotation of Data in protEomics (SPADE) implementation is based on the ProPreO ontology, a large-process ontology ( ~500 classes, 40 named relationships …

Abstract: Global Advertising Exposed: How J. Walter Thompson Conquered Western Europe, Frauke Hachtmann

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

Western Europe's transformation from a group of countries that was almost completely destroyed as a result of World War II to the development of the prosperous European Union in the twenty-first century was a combination of many factors, including substantial monetary aid from the United States but also business know-how in the form of U.S. companies that decided to expand to Europe in search for consumers that were hungry for American products and services. The purpose of this historical paper was to explore how J. Walter Thompson, a U.S.-based global advertising agency, developed from a purely domestic business into one …

As Newsrooms Make Cuts, Put Training First, Carla Kimbrough

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

If your newsroom is shrinking, this is the time to pour more resources into helping your staff become the best they can be. And, it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg. Understanding staff needs is the first step in creating a staff-development program. As the top editor, decide what skills you would like to see your staff polish over the coming months or year. Then, go into the newsroom to ask the staff their needs. Keep the survey simple, so that staff members won't be turned off. With the vision and the needs in mind, use a …

Views Of Community Life In Rural Nebraska, Rebecca J. Vogt, Randolph L. Cantrell, Miguel A. Carranza, Bruce B. Johnson, David J. Peters

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

Most of the smaller communities in rural Nebraska have experienced population decline since 2000 while most of the larger communities have experienced population growth. Given these conditions, how do rural Nebraskans feel about their community? Are they satisfied with the services provided? Are they planning to move from their community next year? How do they view the quality of life in their community? What factors are important in contributing to the quality of life in their community? Do their perceptions differ by community size, the region in which they live, or their occupation? This report details 2,496 responses to the …

Television Signal Changes And Rural Nebraskans, Rebecca Vogt, Randolph Cantrell, Miguel Carranza, Bruce Johnson, David Peters

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

Starting in mid-February 2009, all television stations in the country can only broadcast a digital signal. This change does not affect households that currently receive their television signal from a cable or satellite TV provider, only those that receive their signal over-the-air through an antenna or rabbit ears. The 2008 Nebraska Rural Poll included questions related to television viewing, providing a picture of the effect this change will have on 2,496 randomly selected nonmetropolitan Nebraskans.

Perceptions Of Well-Being And Personal Finances Among Rural Nebraskans, Rebecca J. Vogt, Randolph L. Cantrell, Miguel A. Carranza, Bruce B. Johnson, David J. Peters

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

Nebraska has experienced slow economic growth recently. However, the state has also seen higher farm income this past year. How do rural Nebraskans perceive their quality of life? Do their perceptions differ by community size, the region in which they live, or their occupation? How concerned are rural Nebraskans about their personal finances? This report provides a detailed analysis of these questions.

This report details 2,496 responses to the 2008 Nebraska Rural Poll, the thirteenth annual effort to understand rural Nebraskans’ perceptions. Respondents were asked a series of questions about their individual well-being. Trends for some of these questions are …

Traveling The Semantic Web Through Space, Theme And Time, Amit P. Sheth, Matthew Perry

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this installment of Semantics and Services, we further develop the idea of spatial, temporal, and thematic (STT) processing of semantic Web data and describe the Web infrastructure needed to support it. Starting from Ramesh Jain's vision of the EventWeb as a view of what's possible with a Web that better accommodates all three dimensions of event-related information (thematic, spatial, and temporal), we outline the architecture needed to support it and current research that aims to realize it.

Constructs Of Justice: Beyond Civil Litigation, Alan Tomkins, Kimberly Applequist

Alan Tomkins Publications

It is the case that civil justice problems constitute the bulk of courts’ work in both the state and federal legal systems (see, e.g., Court Statistics Project, 2006; U.S. Courts, 2007). Nevertheless, a decision rendered by a jury (or a judge) takes place in only a relatively small percentage of civil disputes. There are exponentially more civil disputes resolved outside of court than are resolved via jury verdicts (see, e.g., Galanter, 1983, 1993, 1996; Miller & Sarat, 1980–1981; Trubek, Grossman, Felstiner, Kritzer, & Sarat, 1983), a state of affairs true for the UK as well as the US (Pleasence, 2006). …

From Obsession To Confession: A False Confession Paradigm In The Murder Of Jon Benet Ramsey, Morgan Moffa, Judith Platania

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

In this study, we used a fact pattern similar to the John Mark Karr scenario to examine perceptions of DNA and confession evidence. Specifically, we hypothesized that DNA evidence, confessor level of psychopathology, and presence or absence of Miranda protections would affect participants’ perceptions of guilt and attitudes towards the interrogation process. One hundred nine undergraduates read a two-page summary based on John Mark Karr’s confession. Summaries varied based on psychopathology of confessor, the presence or absence of DNA evidence, and the provision of Miranda warnings prior to confession. The DNA manipulation explained participants’ attitudes towards specific aspects of the …

Work-Family Culture: Current Research And Future Directions, Jeanine K. Andreassi, Cynthia A. Thompson

WCBT Faculty Publications

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the role of the work environment—specifically, the culture of support for work–family balance—in understanding employees' work attitudes and behaviors, as well as their stress levels and general well-being. It defines work–family culture and related constructs such as perceived organizational family support. Work–family culture has been defined as the “shared assumptions, beliefs, and values regarding the extent to which an organization supports and values the integration of employees' work and family lives.” It also addresses the important consideration of a national context for understanding work–family culture and offers insights for future research. Some …

The History, Provenance, And Importance Of Byu's Didymus Papyri, Dave Nielsen

Student Works

In 1984 BYU acquired its most prized manuscript holding, the Didymus Papyri. This original acquisition consisted of a full quire or gathering of 10 papyrus bifolia (20 pages) from a cache of manuscripts re-discovered in an ancient stone quarry in 1941 outside of Cairo, Egypt. Regretfully, in the almost 25 years since BYU's acquiring these amazing texts, little to nothing has been done with them. They have not been published and so the world at large has not been able to benefit from the knowledge contained in them, not about their source, Didymus of Alexandria, nor Egyptian Christianity of the …

Stately Halls And Utilitarian Shacks: A History Of The Buildings Of Ouachita Baptist University, Victoria Utterback

Honors Theses

When you step onto the campus of Ouachita Baptist University, you might stop to admire the lovely landscaping and trees lining 6th and Ouachita Street. You might appreciate the architectural beauty of Cone-Bottoms, once said to be the most beautiful residence hall in the South. The abundance of places to sit and relax such as the International Flag Plaza and Fountain, Daniel R. Grant Plaza, and the Katie Speer Pavilion and Gardens only embellish the peaceful atmosphere of the campus. The new state-of-the-art Hickingbotham Hall impresses with its computer labs, classrooms, and lecture halls. Although an essential part of the …

Extinct And Extirpated Birds And Mammals Of Arkansas, Nora Smith

Honors Theses

Arkansas was purchased from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Parts of it were explored by the Dunbar and Hunter expedition in 1804-05. ln 1819, it was detached from the Missouri Territory and made a separate territory. By 1821, the capital moved to Little Rock, and on June 15, 1836, Arkansas became the 25th state of the United States of America. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission was established on March 11, 1915, and the first "real" law pertaining to game hunting was passed. The commission started to establish game refuges in 1929, and by 1960, it …

Is Facebook An Accurate Representation Of Personality?, Hannah Murdock

Honors Theses

The goal of this study was to examine whether there are correlations between online presentation of oneself on Face book (through profile pictures, number of Facebook friends, relationship status, and how often friends are mentioned) and four personality traits (extroversion, social anxiety, self-esteem, and attachment style). Participants completed an online survey to report Facebook information and measure personality traits. Findings show that (a) the more friends one has, the more likely one is to mention them on his or her profile; (b) people with an avoidant attachment style are less likely to have a boyfriend/girlfriend; (c) neither extroversion nor social …