Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Maine Shared Collections Strategy’S Interim Performance Report Year 1, Deborah Rollins, Clem Guthro, Barbara Mcdade, Matthew Revitt

University of Maine Office of Research Administration: Grant Reports

Project Goals

1. To develop a strategy for a state‐wide, multi type library program for managing, storing and preserving print collections among public and private institutions to achieve greater efficiencies and extend the power of every dollar invested in collections and library facilities.

2. To expand access to existing digital book collections by developing print‐on‐demand (POD) and e‐book on‐demand (EOD) services to support long‐term management of a shared print collection, and the integration of digital resources with print collections.

3. To formalize organizational agreements, establish a budget, and develop policies essential for the maintenance of shared print and digital collections, …

Critical Habitat And The Challenge Of Regulating Small Harms., Dave Owen

Publications

This Article investigates how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the courts are implementing the Endangered Species Act’s prohibition on “adverse modification” of “critical habitat.” That prohibition appears to be one of environmental law’s most ambitious mandates, but its actual meaning and effect are contested. Using a database of over 4,000 “biological opinions,” interviews with agency staff, and a review of judicial decisions considering the adverse modification prohibition, this Article assesses the extent to which the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the courts are relying on the adverse modification …

Pine Tree Notes (Jan-Feb 2012), General Federation Of Women's Clubs - Maine Chapter Staff

Maine Women's Publications - All

No abstract provided.

On The Politics Of Climate Knowledge: Sir Giddens, Sweden And The Paradox Of Climate (In)Justice, Cindy Isenhour

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

There is a widespread assumption that most people will not effectively respond to climate risk until they personally experience its negative effects. Yet this assumption raises some interesting questions in the Swedish context. The majority of Swedes say they have not experienced the negative effects of climate change, but they are among the world’s citizens most concerned about and active on the issue. These observations raise the question - why do many Swedes act progressively if they do not feel environmental risks “closer to home”? Is there something exceptional about Swedish environmental ethics, political culture or governance structures? This paper …

Before Elites: The Political Capacities Of Big Men, Paul B. Roscoe

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

In directing us “beyond elites”, the editors of this volume invite us to consider not only whether we have over-estimated the centralized control that metal working enabled or demanded in prehistoric Europe but also to move beyond standard typologies of political forms and evolutionary concepts (Kienlin, this volume). To move beyond elites, of course, we must understand what constitutes an “elite” and elite society. If we take these concepts to imply some kind of socially reproduced restriction on access to leadership positions and accompanying social stratification, then we are asked to consider whether Bronze or Iron Age European societies operated …

Can Consumer Demand Deliver Sustainable Food?: Recent Research In Sustainable Consumption Policy & Practice, Cindy Isenhour

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

From the growth of the Slow Food movement, the growth of patronage at farmers’ markets, and the expansion of ecolabeled foods – an unprecedented number of consumer-based movements have risen in response to concerns about the environmental and social effects of contemporary globalized food systems. Recent research suggests that these movements are often successful in their efforts to support more sustainable food systems. Meanwhile, other scholars point out that, despite common assumptions, the contemporary focus on consumer responsibility in policy and practice indicates much more than a process of reflexive modernization. The devolution of responsibility to consumers and the dominance …

Shifting Policies, Access, And The Tragedy Of Enclosures In Ecuadorian Mangrove Fisheries: Towards A Political Ecology Of The Commons, Christine M. Beitl

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

After decades of mangrove deforestation for the development of shrimp farming, the Ecuadorian state began to officially recognize the ancestral rights of traditional users of coastal mangrove resources in the late 1990s. This article traces the trajectory of coastal policy change and the transformation of mangrove tenure regimes from an implicit preference for shrimp aquaculture to a focus on conservation and sustainable development with greater community participation through the establishment of community-managed mangrove areas called custodias. I argue that while the custodias have empowered local communities in their struggle to defend their livelihoods and environment against the marginalizing forces of …

A Subgroup Analysis Of Legal Needs Among Older Adults In Rural Communities, David C. Wihry, Jennifer A. Crittenden, Lenard W. Kaye, Jaye L. Martin

Maine Center on Aging Research and Evaluation

A legal needs assessment of older adults in Maine was conducted by surveying key populations of older adults who are often hard to reach through traditional outreach and service provision methods. The focus of this assessment was on basic demographics, use of LSE services, legal issues, preferred methods for receiving legal information, and the utility of various legal service options. Surveys were distributed via area agencies on aging, and concluded that the ley legal issues included financial scams, home repair problems, obtaining or retaining government benefits, debt collection, and accessing medical services. Sixty-seven percent of individuals aged 70 or older …

Spatial Working Memory For Locations Specified By Vision And Audition: Testing The Amodality Hypothesis, Jack M. Loomis, Roberta L. Klatzky, Brendan Mchugh, Nicholas A. Giudice

Spatial Information Science and Engineering Faculty Scholarship

Spatial working memory can maintain representations from vision, hearing, and touch, representations referred to here as spatial images. The present experiment addressed whether spatial images from vision and hearing that are simultaneously present within working memory retain modality-specific tags or are amodal. Observers were presented with short sequences of targets varying in angular direction, with the targets in a given sequence being all auditory, all visual, or a sequential mixture of the two. On two thirds of the trials, one of the locations was repeated, and observers had to respond as quickly as possible when detecting this repetition. Ancillary detection …

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 06, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Political events can impact citizens across borders and through time. Folklore is powerful because it provides a vehicle for cross-cultural connections.

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 03, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Students are social actors. As young citizens they can make their voices heard and promote ideas, causes and issues they hold dear. In this exercise students will have the opportunity to see how historic and imaginary characters have promoted their ideals (or the ideals ascribed to them).

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 05, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Citizens participate in government, exercise their rights and fulfill their responsibilities in formal and informal ways. The history of citizen governance in Maine is robust. Maine’s people have articulated the republican virtues of local governance, citizen advocacy and educated participation for nearly two centuries. Maine’s democratic tradition spans generations and has crossed regional and class boundaries. In this exercise students will have the opportunity to learn how citizens in Maine’s working class communities have seized the opportunity to make change and fulfilled their obligations as community leaders.

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 04, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Citizens participate in government, exercise their rights and fulfill their responsibilities in formal and informal ways. An important part of civics education is the study of citizens’ motivations and the types of expressions these motives have given rise to in public discourse. The Maine folklore tradition celebrates the various ways that Maine citizens, particularly Maine’s poor and working-class population, have made their voices heard in the public forum.

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 02, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Citizens participate in government, exercise their rights and fulfill their responsibilities in formal and informal ways. The history of citizen governance in Maine is robust. Maine’s people have articulated the republican virtues of local governance, citizen advocacy and educated participation for nearly two centuries. Maine’s democratic tradition spans generations and has crossed regional and class boundaries. In this exercise students will have the opportunity to learn how citizens in Maine’s working class communities have seized the opportunity to make change and fulfilled their obligations as community leaders.

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 08, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Citizens participate in markets in formal and informal ways. Public commercial transactions and private economic exchanges have historically been important to Maine’s economic viability. Students should be aware of the diversity of economic activity in Maine.

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 10, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Maine’s diverse geography has created a diverse folkloric tradition. Students should be able to identify characteristics of Maine regional diversity in its folklore.

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 09, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Maine’s physical environment is comprised of diverse regions, micro-climes and landforms. This diversity is reflected in various economic, social and cultural developments across the region.

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 11, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Historical analysis is an essential component of folklore studies. Folklore is best understood in historical context. Furthermore, the process of change and evolution – central to the development of folksongs and stories – can only be assessed in light of other social/cultural changes.

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 07, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Maine’s economy has historically been based upon resource extraction and use. Furthermore, Maine’s has historically contained only a very small middle class. Most Mainers could reasonably be described as working class while a small population of upper class elites (known variously as Great Proprietors, owners or sports) has provided structure and capital to Maine industry.

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 12, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Students are the historical actors of the future. Their actions, attitudes and artifacts are the stuff future historians will collect and analyze in order to understand our time. Although we may not consider our lives “historic” to historians of the future they may be. Likewise, the actions, attitudes and artifacts collected in the Maine Song and Story Sampler may not have been considered historic by their creators, but are worthy of our consideration today. In this exercise students will have the opportunity to analyze one artifact from the MS&SS website from the perspective of a professional archivist to determine its …

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 13, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

The study of folklore is a useful pedagogical tool across the Social Studies. As students develop skills and expertise in historical methods, civics, economics, geography and history they can draw upon Maine’s rich folk tradition to illustrate social phenomena. The Maine Song and Story Sampler has been designed to allow citizens access to Maine’s rich folk tradition.

Msss Curriculum Connection Series - Lesson Number: 01, Geoff Wingard

Maine Song and Story Sampler: Curriculum Connections Series

Contemporary social issues are not divorced from the past and arise from specific historical, economic and cultural conditions. In this exercise students will have the opportunity to develop a position on an issue of current concern in their community with an understanding of its cultural context and relevance.

An Analysis Of Ohio's Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard, Joshua A. Laufer

Honors Papers

I performed quantitative analyses and qualitative interpretation of energy policy data, energy production and consumption data, and political data. I collected data on state Renewable Portfolio Standards from the Database for State Incentives for Renewable Energy (DSIRE), energy production and consumption data for the 50 states and Washington D.C. from the Energy Information Agency (EIA), and 1992 presidential election data from the internet. I identify relationships that exist between these different types of variables, and where Ohio fits in the national context of existing energy patterns and policies. There are several conclusions found in the literature that are independently tested …

Changing Museum Visitors’ Conceptions Of Evolution, Amy N. Spiegel, E Margaret Evans, Brandy Frazier, Ashley Hazel, Medha Tare, Wendy Gram, Judy Diamond

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

We examined whether a single visit to an evolution exhibition contributed to conceptual change in adult (n030), youth, and child (n034) museum visitors’ reasoning about evolution. The exhibition included seven current research projects in evolutionary science, each focused on a different organism. To frame this study, we integrated a developmental model of visitors’ understanding of evolution, which incorporates visitors’ intuitive beliefs, with a model of free-choice learning that includes personal, sociocultural, and contextual variables. Using pre- and postmeasures, we assessed how visitors’ causal explanations about biological change, drawn from three reasoning patterns (evolutionary, intuitive, and creationist), were modified as a …

Book Review: The Morality Of Social Identity, David Moshman

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Morality tells us how to treat each other. Social identity connects us to each other. But all is not well. Social identity connects us to a group and thus to its members. Morality requires justice for everyone, regardless of group. Thus considerations of morality and social identity often pull in different directions (Appiah, 2005; Moshman, 2007; Sen, 2006).

Two excellent and complementary new books, Children and Social Exclusion and Narrative and the Politics of Identity, address the developmental roots and implications of these issues. The first reviews and integrates multiple programs of research on children’s developing judgments about dilemmas …

Cognitive Approaches For The Semantic Web, Dedre Gentner, Frank Van Harmelen, Pascal Hitzler, Krzysztof Janowicz, Kai-Uwe Kuhnberger

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

A major focus in the design of Semantic Web ontology languages used to be on finding a suitable balance between the expressivity of the language and the tractability of reasoning services defined over this language. This focus mirrors the original vision of a Web composed of machine readable and understandable data. Similarly to the classical Web a few years ago, the attention is recently shifting towards a user-centric vision of the Semantic Web. Essentially, the information stored on the Web is from and for humans. This new focus is not only reflected in the fast growing Linked Data Web but …

Does Faculty Tenure Improve Student Graduation Rates?, G. Thomas Sav

Economics Faculty Publications

The primary objective of this paper is to determine whether tenure in comparison to non-tenure faculty employment is efficient in producing the academic success of university students. A stochastic production frontier is estimated for university graduation rates while the inefficiency specification includes measures of tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track faculty employment. Using panel data for U.S. doctoral and master level public universities, the evidence indicates that the employment status does matter and that increases in the pro- portion of tenured faculty employment lead to efficiency gains in graduation rates. Effects of tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty are somewhat mixed with …

Data Envelopment Analysis Of Productivity Changes In Higher Education For-Profit Enterprises Compared To Non-Profits, G. Thomas Sav

Economics Faculty Publications

Data envelopment analysis is used to compare private for-profit colleges to publicly owned colleges in terms of their operating efficiency and productivity. Academic year 2005-09 panel data is used for two-year institutions in the U.S. Results indicate that for-profit efficiency exceeded that of public colleges. Malmquist index results show that colleges in both sectors increased managerial and scale efficiencies, but that both were hindered by technological regress to the extent that overall productivity declined. 2007-08 created efficiency declines across the board, but for-profits managed large technological gains that produced the only annual productivity improvement for either sector. The results are …

Public Input For City Budgeting Using E-Input, Face-To-Face Discussions, And Random Sample Surveys: The Willingness Of An American Community To Increase Taxes, Alan Tomkins, Rick D. Hoppe, Mitch Herian, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Tarik Abdel-Monem, Nancy Shank

Lisa PytlikZillig Publications

Regular public input into a city's budget is frequently associated with municipal budgeting in Brazilian cities, successes in public engagement that have been emulated around the world. American communities are adopting the practice to varying degrees. This paper will report on a five-year old public input program that is taking place in Lincoln, Nebraska, the capital city of a politically conservative state in the U.S. We discuss the processes we use to engage the public about the City's budget. The process includes regular online input as well as face-to-face, deliberative discussions. On occasions, random sample surveys also have been used. …

Defying Victimhood: Women And Post-Conflict Peacebuilding, Albrecht Schnabel, Anara Tabyshalieva

History Faculty Research

The chapters in this volume cover a wide range of women’s post-conflict peacebuilding experiences in different parts of the world. Post-conflict situations are windows of opportunity during which gender relations can and should be rethought and which, if properly utilized, can serve as the right moment to “rewrite” the rules and practices that previously served as obstacles to the participation of women in society. Overall, our book is meant to challenge the popular and often-propagated assumption that women should be supported, empowered and given a voice merely in their roles as victims. Collectively, we provide evidence in support of the …