Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 10, No. 3, King Banaian, Richard A. Macdonald

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

No abstract provided.

Comparative Risk Assessment And Alternative Closure Techniques Of Abandoned Manure Storage Basins In Central Minnesota, Joe Storlien

Culminating Projects in Environmental and Technological Studies

Manure storage basins are a necessary component to many animal agriculture production systems. Manures within these basins are a valuable source of nutrients for crops, however they must be managed appropriately to protect water resources. Some contaminants found within animal manures may pose potential human or environmental health risks.

The objectives of this study were to: 1) determine characteristics of eight sites containing abandoned manure storage basins; 2) quantify contaminant concentration in soil and groundwater at the abandoned basin sites; 3) quantify the comparative risk posed by the abandoned basins; 4) determine overall comparative risk posed by the abandoned manure …

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 10, No. 2, King Banaian, Richard A. Macdonald

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

No abstract provided.

The Effectiveness Of Information Literacy Instruction At St. Cloud State University: A Lesson In Situated Cognition, Jennifer C. Hill

Culminating Projects in Information Media

In 2006 The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article describing a study completed by the Educational Testing Service (ETS). ETS estimated that only 13% of incoming freshman students were information literate. Studies by Mittermeyer (2005), Wassman (2000), and the Intersegmenatl Committee of the Academic Senates of the California Community Colleges (2002) confirm this diagnosis. Information literacy speaks to the skills of finding, evaluating, and presenting information. Indeed, these skills are crucial in the information age. This paper sought to discover if the for-credit undergraduate information literacy courses (Information Media [IM] 104 and 204) at St. Cloud State University (SCSU) …

Lr&Ts Annual Report 2007-2008, St. Cloud State University

Library Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Lr&Ts Assessment Report 2007-2008, Chris Inkster

Library Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 10, No. 1, King Banaian, Richard A. Macdonald

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

No abstract provided.

Who's Caring For The Kids? The Status Of The Wages And Working Conditions Of The Early Childhood Workforce In Minnesota, Jennifer L. Andres

Culminating Projects in Child and Family Studies

The purpose of this study was to determine the wages and benefits that Minnesota center-based early childhood teachers received during 2007. The study utilized a questionnaire that was distributed to a random sample of licensed, center-based child care programs in Minnesota. Five hundred programs were randomly selected and surveyed with a response of247 programs (48.4%). The results were compared to the results of a similar study completed in 1996.

Results of the study indicated that a large percentage of the teachers (45%) still received less than $10.00 per hour for their work. Only 5% of the teachers earned $18.00-$20.00 per …

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 09, No. 4, King Banaian, Richard A. Macdonald

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

No abstract provided.

Spring 2008 Economics Newsletter, Economics Department

Economics Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Summer 2008 Economics Newsletter, Economics Department

Economics Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Fall 2008 Economics Newsletter, Economics Department

Economics Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Does Sex Sell? A Look At The Effects Of Sex And Violence On Motion Picture Revenues, David Switzer, David M. Lang

Economics Seminar Series

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is responsible for assigning all movies one of five movie ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17). Previous research has found that G and PGrated movies perform better at the box office, yet movie studios continue to make more PG-13 and R-rated movies. Other research has used data on a film’s levels of sex, violence and profanity (SVP), to explore the link between SVP, movie rating, and box office revenues. In this paper, we use a more recent data set and include additional variables to account for movie quality to further explore this relationship. …

Stability Of The Euro-Demand Function, King Banaian, Artatrana Ratha

Economics Faculty Working Papers

While the empirical literature on money demand is vast by any standards, it is relatively silent when it comes to the Euro, a major currency in the world. This hampers efforts, for example, to determine whether or not the European Central Bank can target monetary aggregates for inflation control. The difficulty has come from the lack of information about euro-wide monetary behavior, relying instead on speculative techniques for aggregating country-level data from previous periods of the European exchange rate mechanism. Now that we have six years of monthly data points, we investigate the stability of various Euro-zone monetary aggregates using …

Effects Of Subsidies On Symphony Orchestra Repertoire, William A. Luksetich, Patricia A. Hughes

Economics Faculty Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Measuring Central Bank Independence: Ordering, Ranking, Or Scoring?, King Banaian

Economics Faculty Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Does An Undervalued Currency Promote Growth? Evidence From China, Artatrana Ratha, Eungmin Kang, Mary Edwards

Economics Faculty Working Papers

Whether currency devaluation promotes growth remains an empirically open question. Coexistence of an undervalued currency and the world’s largest trade surplus alongside a booming economy makes China a unique case study. Using annual data over 1977-2006 and the relatively recent “bounds-testing approach” to cointegration and error-correction modeling, we estimate a reduced form model to investigate the exchange rate sensitivity of China’s real GDP. We find that currency devaluation is contractionary in China.

Who Moved My Pinakes? : Cataloging And Change, Tina Gross

Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Leadership And Gender: An Experiment, Mana Komai, Philip Grossman

Economics Faculty Working Papers

We present an information based model of leadership in a setting that exhibits the familiar problems of free riding and coordination failure. Leaders have superior information about the value of the project in hand and can send a costly signal to their uninformed followers to persuade them to cooperate in the project. Followers voluntarily choose whether or not to follow the better informed leader. We provide experimental evidence that, when the leaders’ gender is revealed to their followers, female subjects hesitate to lead (send a costly signal) while followers’ behavior does not indicate any gender discrimination. Such behavior is not …

Does Providing Accurate Information About Slot Machines Alter How Participants Play Them?, Jeffrey N. Weatherly, Ellen Meier

Analysis of Gambling Behavior

It is a commonly held belief that irrational thoughts held by gamblers can pro-mote gambling behavior and ultimately pathological gambling. Some evidence exists to support this view, but little experimental work demonstrates that con-fronting these beliefs will lead to a decrease in gambling behavior. Eighteen non-pathological participants were given the option to play a slot machine for money. After gambling in two sessions, they were given accurate information about the independence of turns programmed by a slot machine, the negative rate of return of a slot machine over time, or both. Participants were then given the option to gamble in …

Commentary - Approaching Gambling As A Verbal Event: A Commentary On Fantino & Stolarz-Fantino (2008), Simon Dymond

Analysis of Gambling Behavior

No abstract provided.

Using Performance Feedback To Teach Video Poker Players To Gamble Better, Mark R. Dixon, James W. Jackson

Analysis of Gambling Behavior

The present investigation reports two studies that examined the performance of non-pathological recreational video poker gamblers. In the first experiment, seven participants played three types of video poker games in a within partici-pants randomized sequence design. The percentage of errors made across games revealed the game variant “Deuces Wild” yielded more frequent mistakes than “Jacks or Better” or “Bonus Poker.” The second experiment consisted of a new sample of 11 participants being exposed to “Deuces Wild” poker to initially assess error percentages. Next, participants were all provided with performance feedback regarding their play, and finally the feedback was removed to …

Investigating Illusion Of Control In Experienced And Non-Experienced Gamblers: Replication And Extension, Lingyuan Wong, Jennifer L. Austin

Analysis of Gambling Behavior

The illusion of control is a phenomenon in which one erroneously believes he or she can exert control over the contingencies of chance events. To date, many of the studies investigating this phenomenon as it applies to gambling have used artificial gambling contexts and participants with no history of gambling beha-vior (i.e., undergraduates). This study replicated the procedures outlined in Di-xon, Hayes and Ebbs (1998) using experienced and inexperienced gamblers in a more natural gambling setting. Participants played 20 rounds of a game of rou-lette in which the default procedure was for the dealer to choose the bets. How-ever, players …

Commentary - Gambling: Not What It May Seem To Be, Jeffrey N. Weatherly

Analysis of Gambling Behavior

No abstract provided.

Do The Risk Factors For Pathological Gambling Predict Temporal Discounting?, Jeffrey N. Weatherly, Adam Derenne, Samantha Chase

Analysis of Gambling Behavior

Weatherly and Dixon (2007) proposed that gambling was related to the increase in how individuals discount delayed (monetary) consequences and that several of the known risk factors for pathological gambling may serve as establishing operations or setting events that lead to such changes. The present study tested these predictions by having participants complete a paper-and-pencil discount-ing task involving hypothetical monetary consequences and determining wheth-er self-reported measures of the known risk factors would significantly predict participants’ rate of discounting. None of the risk factors served as significant predictors of discounting. Interestingly, however, the rate of discounting varied systematically as a function …

Delay Discounting And Pathological Gambling, Mark R. Dixon

Analysis of Gambling Behavior

Over the past decade behavior analysts have paid increasing attention to the clin-ical phenomena of pathological gambling. Explorations have varied from ani-mal models to therapeutic interventions. Perhaps no topic has received greater attention in the behavioral gambling literature than the discounting of delayed consequences. Delay discounting has been noted as both a conceptual frame-work to understand problem gambling as well as a dependent variable by which to deduce level of pathology. Regardless of hypothesized process, discounting appears to be a topic of great interest to those within the behavioral community. This special section of the Analysis of Gambling Behavior brings …

Commentary - Understanding Gambling, Impulsivity, And Decision-Making: Self-Report And Behavioral Considerations, Marc N. Potenza

Analysis of Gambling Behavior

No abstract provided.

Commentary - Gambling, Shaping And Ratio Contingencies, A. Charles Catania

Analysis of Gambling Behavior

No abstract provided.

Slot Machine Preferences And Self-Rules, Terje Fredheim, Kai-Ove Ottersen, Erik Arntzen

Analysis of Gambling Behavior

The present study was a replication and extension of Zlomke and Dixon (2006) investigating the impact of contextually trained discriminations on slot-machine gambling. In each of two experiments, 20 participants were exposed to two con-currently available slot-machines differing only in color. Thus, Experiment 1 was a replication, while in Experiment 2 we included an instruction to ensure that the participants attended to all of the onscreen stimuli. Following a pretest of slot machine preferences, a nonarbitrary relational training and testing proce-dure was used to establish contextual functions of MORE-THAN and LESS-THAN for two cues. After relational training the participants were …

Commentary - Discounting Within The Gambling Context, Gregory J. Madden

Analysis of Gambling Behavior

No abstract provided.