Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Evaporation Estimates For Irrigated Agriculture In California, Charles M. Burt, Daniel J. Howes, Andrew Mutziger

BioResource and Agricultural Engineering

All California irrigation districts that receive either federal or state water are now required to prepare Water Conservation Plans. For the first time in the history of most districts, they are developing an elementary water balance. The term "elementary" should be emphasized, because there are significant weaknesses in our knowledge of subsurface flows and some components of Evapotranspiration (ET). Irrigation districts generally use published "typical" values of ET for their water balance computations.

Shared Scientific Thinking In Everyday Parent-Child Activity, Kevin Crowley, Maureen A. Callanan, Jennifer Jipson, Jodi Galco, Karen Topping, Jeff Shrager

Psychology and Child Development

Current accounts of the development of scientific reasoning focus on individual children's ability to coordinate the collection and evaluation of evidence with the creation of theories to explain the evidence. This observational study of parent–child interactions in a children's museum demonstrated that parents shape and support children's scientific thinking in everyday, nonobligatory activity. When children engaged an exhibit with parents, their exploration of evidence was observed to be longer, broader, and more focused on relevant comparisons than children who engaged the exhibit without their parents. Parents were observed to talk to children about how to select and encode appropriate evidence …

Purchasing Power Parity And Interest Parity In The Laboratory, Eric O'N. Fisher

Economics

This paper analyses purchasing power parity and uncovered interest parity in the laboratory. It finds strong evidence that purchasing power parity, covered interest parity, and uncovered interest parity hold. Subjects are endowed with an intrinsically useless (green) currency that can be used to purchase another useless (red) currency. Green goods can be bought only with green currency, and red goods can be bought only with red currency. The foreign exchange markets are organized as call markets. In the treatment analysing purchasing power parity, the price of the red good varies. In a second treatment, the interest rate on red currency …

Beggar-Thy-Neighbor Advertising: Theory And Application To Generic Commodity Promotion Programs, Jennifer S. James, Julian M. Alston, John W. Freebairn

Agribusiness

Profits from generic advertising by a producer group often come partly at the expense of producers of closely related commodities. The resulting tendency toward excessive advertising is exacerbated by check-off funding. To analyze this beggar-thy-neighbor behavior we compare a scenario where different producer groups cooperate and choose their advertising expenditures jointly to maximize the sum of profits across the groups, and a scenario where they optimize independently. In an illustrative example using 1998 data for U.S. beef and pork, the noncooperatively chosen expenditure on beef and pork advertising is more than three times the cooperative optimum.

The Motivational Basis Of Concessions And Compromise: Archival And Laboratory Studies, Carrie A. Langner, David G. Winter

Psychology and Child Development

A content analysis system for measuring positive concessions (offering concessions) and negative concessions (rejecting offered concessions) was introduced and validated through an archival study of government-to-government documents from 4 crises, 2 of which escalated to war and 2 of which were peacefully resolved. In the archival documents, concession making was positively associated with affiliation motivation and negatively associated with power motivation. A 2nd, laboratory experimental study confirmed these relationships and demonstrated priming effects of motive imagery and concession making, in a received diplomatic letter, on participants' responses. Finally, the motive imagery and concessions scores in participants' responses were related in …

Review Of Public Journalism And Political Knowledge, Douglas J. Swanson

Journalism

No abstract provided.

Do Crime-Related Expenditures Crowd Out Higher Education Expenditures?, Michael L. Marlow, Alden F. Shiers

Economics

Fears about insufficient public education spending are often expressed in the area of higher education, whereby it is often argued that increases in expenditures on crime-related programs crowd out expenditures on higher education. This view suggests that higher education and crime-related programs directly compete for government expenditures so that what one program gains the other must lose as in a zero-sum game. A competing hypothesis is that higher crime-related spending leads to higher taxes or public debt issuance or to lower spending on programs other than higher education. We estimate a three-equation model of spending on crime-related programs, spending on …

Technological Choice: California Wild Rice Processing Under Uncertain Demand, Jay E. Noel, James J. Ahern, Jess Errecarte, Kyle Schroeder

Agribusiness

This study is concerned with technological choice under uncertain demand conditions. It begins with an overview of the California wild rice market. The wild rice product is described, the wild rice industry is review and wild rice market conditions are explored. The overview is followed by a discussion of wild rice processing. Technological choice and competitive strategy issues are reviewed and then a framework for choosing between two competing technologies is proposed. The two competing technologies differ in their ability to store and process wild rice over a marketing year. The traditional technologies requires almost immediate processing of the harvested …

Communicating About Mass Communication: A National Study Of The Content, Functionality, And Value Of University Mass Communication Program World Wide Web Sites, Douglas J. Swanson

Journalism

A study was undertaken to assess college and university mass communication program World Wide Web site content, functionality, and value, and to gauge faculty members' opinions related to Web site creation and maintenance. Descriptive statistics, analysis of variance and t-tests were used to address three hypotheses relating to Web site use by academic programs and related perceptions of social order by faculty: Most programs had an operational Web site. Site enhancements varied widely while most faculty members' opinions were thematically consistent.

World Dairy Product Trade: Analysis With A Mixed Complementarity Problem Formulation, Charles F. Nicholson, Phillip M. Bishop

Agribusiness

World trade in dairy products is being transformed by trade policy liberalization and technological change in dairy processing. The mixed complementarity problem formulation to modeling product-specific dairy trade can overcome a number of the limitations of existing optimization models, and can facilitate desirable extensions to previous analyses.

Bureaucracy And Student Performance In Us Public Schools, Michael L. Marlow

Economics

This paper tests the hypothesis that monopoly power of school districts allows bureaucratic expansion and fosters poor academic performance in the public school system in California. Evidence indicates that monopoly power is positively associated with employment of administrators and teachers, and therefore supports the bureaucratic expansion hypothesis. While numbers of teachers do not influence performance measures, numbers of administrators are shown to positively affect performance - results that suggest that too many teachers, but too few administrators, are employed. While bureaucracy theory may explain the resource misallocation, other reasons might include rising public pressures on hiring teachers over administrators, spending …

Consumer Perceptions Of Three Food Safety Interventions Related To Meat Processing, Christiane Schroeter, Karen P. Penner, John A. Fox

Agribusiness

A focus group study with 37 residents of Manhattan, Kansas, was conducted to examine consumers' risk perceptions of foodborne illnesses from eating beef. The four focus-group sessions were designed to determine (1) relative preferences for alternative combinations of public food safety measures (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points [HACCP], carcass pasteurization, irradiation) and private protection (home preparation of rare, medium, and well-done hamburgers); (2) how who is at risk (children vs. adults) influences preferences; (3) whether consumers would pay a premium for increased product safety arising from the adoption of three different innovations in processing plants; and (4) how to improve …

Dollarization And The Mexican Labor Market, George J. Borjas, Eric O'N. Fisher

Economics

This paper examines how dollarization affects the internal wage structure in the Mexican labor market, and alters the incentives of Mexican nationals to emigrate to the United States. A simple model shows that by adopting a fixed rate regime tied directly to the U.S. dollar, Mexican policy makers are in effect giving up “a degree of freedom” in their toolkit of policy remedies. If there are imperfections in the Mexican economy, such as downward wage rigidity, an adverse economic shock would generate more unemployment in a dollarized economy, further increasing the propensity of Mexican workers to migrate to the United …

An Analysis Of Second Time Around Bankruptcies Using A Split-Population Duration Model, Arindam Bandopadhyaya, Sanjiv Jaggia

Economics

A significant proportion of firms that reorganize under Chapter 11 file for a second Chapter 11 protection or liquidate. We use a "split-population" duration model that provides useful information regarding factors that could lead to a second bankruptcy. We find that the probability (hazard) of a firm re-entering bankruptcy is lower for firms that take a long time to reorganize, reduce their debt-to-assets ratio, do not divest, belong to an industry that has low capacity utilization and low demand growth. We also find that the probability of an average firm re-entering bankruptcy increases for about 4 years before declining.

'Standing Porter At The Door Of Thought': The Social Order Of The Christian Science Church, Douglas J. Swanson

Journalism

The Church of Christ, Scientist, is a unique organization to study in the context of institutional social order. The church is a 21st century religious movement that is bound to an unchangeable theology and intractable management structure developed by its 19th century founder. The church is a worldly business entity whose leadership manipulates assets, personnel, media and information while striving for "rectitude and spiritual understanding" (Eddy, 1906, p. 403). Christian Science is a way of life which systemizes the personality of its charismatic founder while denying the reality of all things physical and personal. Examining the seemingly contradictory social order …

The Effects Of Famine, Maternal Age, And Paternal Age On Fetal Loss In Rural Bangladesh, D. B. Neill, D. J. Holman

Social Sciences

The effect of famine on fetal loss has been well documented for a number of populations. In this paper we examine the effect of famine on fetal loss in rural Bangladesh, which experienced a severe famine during 1973 and 1974 following the 1971 war for independence. Using data from the Internal Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, the effect of famine on fetal loss is examined considering both maternal age (MA) and paternal age (PA). Observations include records of 65,590 pregnancies from 254,471 individuals followed from 1974 to 1982.

Logistic regression was used to model the effects of MA, PA, …

Learning Words Through Overhearing, Nameera Akhtar, Jennifer Jipson, Maureen A. Callanan

Psychology and Child Development

Recent research indicates that toddlers can monitor others' conversations, raising the possibility that they can acquire vocabulary in this way. Three studies examined 2-year-olds' (N= 88) ability to learn novel words when overhearing these words used by others. Children aged 2,6 were equally good at learning novel words— both object labels and action verbs—when they were overhearers as when they were directly addressed. For younger 2-year-olds (2,1), this was true for object labels, but the results were less clear for verbs. The findings demonstrate that 2-year-olds can acquire novel words from overheard speech, and highlight the active role …

The Prehistory Of Big Creek, Terry L. Jones

Social Sciences

Archaeological research began at Big Creek in 1983 with the first of four summer field classes offered by UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis. For the most part, this was the first systematic research to be undertaken in the South Coast Range or on the Sur coast, and certainly the first of any consequence in the Big Creek drainage. Before 1983, archaeologists had tended to overlook Big Sur (however, see Baldwin 1971) because it seemed unlikely that it had been a major demographic or cultural center for prehistoric peoples. While it remains true that populations in Big Sur were probably …

Explanatory Conversations And Young Children's Developing Scientific Literacy, Jennifer Jipson

Psychology and Child Development

No abstract provided.

Authority, Social Theories Of, Eduardo Zambrano

Economics

Authority is a relation that exists between individuals, in which one does as indicated by another what he or she would not do in the absence of such indication. With this as background, the article presents the ‘premodern’ notions of authority developed by Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Weber; and then the perspective given by Arendt, according to which these notions are grounded in an ontological tradition whose time has passed. This leads to the point of view of Lukes, according to which it is unavoidable that multiple perspectives exist in the understanding of authority. These perspectives are associated with the …

Murgo Farms Inc.: Haccp, Iso 9000, And Iso 14000, David Sparling, Jonathon Lee, Wayne Howard

Agribusiness

Murgo Farms Inc., addresses the challenge of choosing between the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP), International Organization of Standardization (ISO) 9000, and ISO 14000 systems for a business with grain farming, elevator and spraying enterprises. Murgo has recently entered markets that are more quality oriented and wishes to expand its activities in those markets. The President wonders whether HACCP or ISO 9000 might help that expansion. However, the company is also faced with significant environmental risks due to its spraying and manure spreading activities and its proximity to a local municipal water source. There are good reasons for Murgo …