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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2008

Iowa State University

Articles 1 - 12 of 12

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Cooperative Extension: A Complex Organization, Nancy K. Franz, Lisa Townson Dec 2008

Cooperative Extension: A Complex Organization, Nancy K. Franz, Lisa Townson

Nancy K. Franz

The authors provide an overview of the Cooperative Extension System and its program evaluation challenges. Part of the historic land-grant system, Extension exists in all states and territories of the United States and is funded through federal, state, and local (usually county) appropriations, as well as competitive grants and other sources. Complex funding, staffing, and accountability structures combined with widely varying programs and delivery methods make program development and evaluation challenging for Extension. Although each state’s Extension service operates autonomously, they all share a need to communicate program impacts and public value, which has become the main driver for program …

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Commodity Exports, Invisible Exports And Terms Of Trade For The Middle Colonies, 1720 To 1775, Peter Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas J. Weiss Sep 2008

Commodity Exports, Invisible Exports And Terms Of Trade For The Middle Colonies, 1720 To 1775, Peter Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Thomas J. Weiss

Joshua L. Rosenbloom

Economic historians of the eighteenth-century British mainland North American colonies have given considerable weight to the role of exports as a stimulus for economic growth. Yet their analyses have been handicapped by reliance on one or two time series to serve as indicators of broader changes rather than considering the export sector as a whole. Here we present new comprehensive export measures for the middle colonies. We find that aggregate exports in constant prices grew very quickly, but barely faster than population during the period under consideration. Furthermore, improvements in the terms of trade increased the colonists’ ability to buy …

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Unforeseen Consequences Of Mothers’ Return To School On Children’S Education Aspirations And Outcomes, J. Jill Suitor, Mari Plikuhn, Megan Gilligan, Rebecca S. Powers Aug 2008

Unforeseen Consequences Of Mothers’ Return To School On Children’S Education Aspirations And Outcomes, J. Jill Suitor, Mari Plikuhn, Megan Gilligan, Rebecca S. Powers

Megan Gilligan

Parents' educational attainment is generally completed before offspring are born. Thus, there is little opportunity to study the ways in which children's observation of their parents' pursuit of education may augment the effects of structural factors on intergenerational transmission processes. In this article, the authors use qualitative and quantitative data collected from thirty-five women across a decade following their return to school to examine the effects of children's observations of their mothers' educational achievements on the children's educational aspirations and achievements in adulthood. The return to school was consequential only when mothers completed their degrees; when they did not, their …

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Plan Your Future With Advance Directives Poster, Debra M. Sellers Aug 2008

Plan Your Future With Advance Directives Poster, Debra M. Sellers

Debra M. Sellers

Poster, three pages that define Living Will, Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care.

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Assistive Technology Postcard, Debra M. Sellers, Erin J. Dittman Jul 2008

Assistive Technology Postcard, Debra M. Sellers, Erin J. Dittman

Debra M. Sellers

Postcard on assistive technology, tools to help make life easier, for people with arthritis, disabilities, etc.

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Fashion An Easier Lifestyle With Assistive Technology: Leader's Guide, Debra M. Sellers, Erin J. Dittman Jul 2008

Fashion An Easier Lifestyle With Assistive Technology: Leader's Guide, Debra M. Sellers, Erin J. Dittman

Debra M. Sellers

Assistive technology is about tools to help make life easier, for people with arthritis, disabilities, etc. It helps with meals, housework, personal care, and other activities.

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Fashion An Easier Lifestyle With Assistive Technology: Fact Sheet, Debra M. Sellers, Erin J. Dittman Jul 2008

Fashion An Easier Lifestyle With Assistive Technology: Fact Sheet, Debra M. Sellers, Erin J. Dittman

Debra M. Sellers

Assistive technology is about tools to help make life easier, for people with arthritis, disabilities, etc. It helps with meals, housework, personal care, and other activities.

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Kansas In The Great Depression: Work Relief, The Dole, And Rehabilitation. By Peter Fearon. Columbia And London: University Of Missouri Press, 2007. Pp. Xv, 316. $44.95., Joshua L. Rosenbloom Mar 2008

Kansas In The Great Depression: Work Relief, The Dole, And Rehabilitation. By Peter Fearon. Columbia And London: University Of Missouri Press, 2007. Pp. Xv, 316. $44.95., Joshua L. Rosenbloom

Joshua L. Rosenbloom

The provision of welfare in the United States was transformed in the 1930s as county-based relief efforts collapsed under the burden of massive and sustained unemployment. The system of federal-state partnership that emerged in its place developed less through systematic and conscious planning than as the accidental result of a process of trial and error driven by the interaction between federal government officials and their counterparts in the states. In Kansas in the Great Depression Peter Fearon offers a careful examination of how efforts to address the pressing needs of the unemployed evolved in one state, Kansas, over the course …

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The Effects Of Accomplice Witnesses And Jailhouse Informants On Jury Decision Making, Jeffrey S. Neuschatz, Deah S. Quinlivan, Jessica K. Swanner, Christian A. Meissner, Joseph S. Neuschatz Jan 2008

The Effects Of Accomplice Witnesses And Jailhouse Informants On Jury Decision Making, Jeffrey S. Neuschatz, Deah S. Quinlivan, Jessica K. Swanner, Christian A. Meissner, Joseph S. Neuschatz

Jessica K Swanner

The present study presents one of the first investigations of the effects of accomplice witnesses and jailhouse informants on jury decision-making. Across two experiments, participants read a trial transcript that included either a secondary confession from an accomplice witness, a jailhouse informant, a member of the community or a no confession control. In half of the experimental trial transcripts, the participants were made aware that the cooperating witness providing the secondary confession was given an incentive to testify. The results of both experiments revealed that information about the cooperating witness’ incentive (e.g., leniency or reward) did not affect participants’ verdict …

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Automated Diagnostic Writing Tests: Why? How?, Elena Cotos, Nick Pendar Jan 2008

Automated Diagnostic Writing Tests: Why? How?, Elena Cotos, Nick Pendar

Elena Cotos

Diagnostic language assessment can greatly benefit from a collaborative union of computer-assisted language testing (CALT) and natural language processing (NLP). Currently, most CALT applications mainly allow for inferences about L2 proficiency based on learners’ recognition and comprehension of linguistic input and hardly concern language production (Holland, Maisano, Alderks, & Martin, 1993). NLP is now at a stage where it can be used or adapted for diagnostic testing of learner production skills. This paper explores the viability of NLP techniques for the diagnosis of L2 writing by analyzing the state of the art in current diagnostic language testing, reviewing the existing …

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Automatic Identification Of Discourse Moves In Scientific Article Introductions, Elena Cotos, Nick Pendar Jan 2008

Automatic Identification Of Discourse Moves In Scientific Article Introductions, Elena Cotos, Nick Pendar

Elena Cotos

This paper reports on the first stage of building an educational tool for international graduate students to improve their academic writing skills. Taking a text-categorization approach, we experimented with several models to automatically classify sentences in research article introductions into one of three rhetorical moves. The paper begins by situating the project within the larger framework of intelligent computer-assisted language learning. It then presents the details of the study with very encouraging results. The paper then concludes by commenting on how the system may be improved and how the project is intended to be pursued and evaluated.

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Psychophysics Of Perceiving Eye-Gaze And Head Direction With Peripheral Vision: Implications For The Dynamics Of Eye-Gaze Behavior, Jack M. Loomis, Jonathan W. Kelly, Matthias Pusch, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Andrew C. Beall Jan 2008

Psychophysics Of Perceiving Eye-Gaze And Head Direction With Peripheral Vision: Implications For The Dynamics Of Eye-Gaze Behavior, Jack M. Loomis, Jonathan W. Kelly, Matthias Pusch, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Andrew C. Beall

Jonathan W. Kelly

Two psychophysical experiments are reported, one dealing with the visual perception of the head orientation of another person (the `looker') and the other dealing with the percep- tion of the looker's direction of eye gaze. The participant viewed the looker with different retinal eccentricities, ranging from foveal to far-peripheral viewing. On average, judgments of head orientation were reliable even out to the extremes of peripheral vision (90 8 eccentricity), with better performance at the extremes when the participant was able to view the looker changing head orientation from one trial to the next. In sharp contrast, judgments of eye-gaze direction …

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