Digital Commons Network^™

Prepare For Takeoff: Improving Asset Measurement And Audit Quality With Drone-Enabled Inventory Audit Procedures, Margaret H. Christ, Scott A. Emett, Scott L. Summers, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

Auditors increasingly employ technologies to improve audit quality. Using a design science approach, we examine whether using drones and automated counting software can improve audit quality and thereby improve financial reporting. We assess three dimensions of audit quality—efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of audit documentation. We provide evidence that auditors can perform inventory counts with these technologies much more efficiently than they can with manual techniques, decreasing count time in our study from 681 hours to 19 hours. At the same time, auditors can maintain or improve audit effectiveness with these technologies, decreasing error rates in our study from 0.15% to …

The Contested Works Of The Bakhtin Circle: A Stylometric Investigation, Brittany Pheiffer Noble

Russian Language Journal

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975) emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century as one of the most important theorists of literature, language, and cultural theory in the West. The discovery of the thinker in the nearly immediate wake of his death dovetailed with late twentieth-century critiques of language, authorial authority, and questions around the ethics of reading and media consumption. Bakhtin’s biography fueled his popularity: his was a life largely lived on the margins of an oppressive regime, and he wrote prolifically while surviving famine, siege, exile, health problems, and an almost complete absence of professional recognition save for …

Towards Intelligent Correction Of Collocational Errors In Russian L2 Academic Texts In The Cat&Kittens Writing Support Platform, Aleksandr Klimov, Olesya Kisselev, Mikhail Kopotev

Russian Language Journal

The study of academic language is driven to a large extent by the need to teach second language (L2) writers about established practices and patterns found across different genres and registers common in academic written discourse. Over the span of the past few decades, the area of academic language research has been hugely influenced by two interconnected digital approaches: computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and computational linguistics, including corpus linguistics approaches and tools.

Assessment Design In Online Russian Language Courses: Lessons From Covid-19, Yuliana Gunn

Russian Language Journal

This article examines various tools, approaches, and strategies for conducting language assessments in an online environment for all language levels during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. To complement tools available through the learning management system, online assessments can be retooled to be more communicative and interactive tasks, and measure language gains across the three modes of communication (interpersonal, interpretive and presentational). This article argues for increasing transparency in online classrooms and provides insights into initial student receptiveness and preferences for these new online assessments through an examination of anonymous student survey results.

Raise Your Hand: Online Language And Culture Instruction, Inclusivity, And Critical Pedagogy, Thomas Jesús Garza

Russian Language Journal

The strained pedagogies in the wake of the transition to virtual online delivery of instruction in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, while taxing some instructors’ and students’ patience, have also resulted in reimagined curricula and new opportunities for student engagement and participation in our language and culture courses. This essay presents a rationale for the creation of ecologies of equity and inclusion within online delivery of course content on platforms such as Zoom, including suggestions for creating Breakout Room tasks and activities that encourage critical engagement and dialogue among learners and facilitate the creation of “safe spaces” for open …

Rectifying Wikipedia Racial Bias In A Russian Language Classroom, Veronika Trotter, Svitlana Melnyk

Russian Language Journal

Over the last decade, minority representation has emerged as a subject of critical self-reflection in the field of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (SEEES), prompting discussions that have centered on both the limited participation of minority populations within the community of SEEES scholars and students and the relative lack of attention that minority communities receive in SEEES teaching and research. Efforts to grapple with both issues became more urgent in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the massive protests for racial justice throughout the United States and beyond. Major centers for SEEES teaching and research have organized well-attended …

Implementing Inclusive Secondary Russian Language Exchange Programs, Anna Stewart, Rebecca Berman, Emily Olmstead, Ashlynn Cobb, Emily Matts Henry

Russian Language Journal

This discussion is a case study of the National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) program’s overseas and virtual Russian language offerings. The study also provides considerations and examples for embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion into the program design. Special attention is given to identifying Russian language opportunities for American high school students, expanding accessibility, centering program materials on inclusion, and embedding perspectives of the robust regional diversity within the Russian-speaking world into the NSLI-Y program. While the NSLI-Y program partners with many organizations in various locations, examples provided here focus on NSLI-Y programs implemented by American Councils for International …

Excerpt From Ключевые Идеи Русской Языковой Картины Мира: The Breadth Of The Russian Soul, Alexei D. Shmelev, Nicole-Marie Konopelko, Translator, Stephen M. Dickey, Preface

Russian Language Journal

In 2005 a collection of articles appeared under the title Ключевые идеи русской языковой картины мира (‘Key Ideas of the Russian Linguistic Worldview’), authored by Anna A. Zalizniak, Irina B. Levontina and Aleksei D. Shmelev and published by the Языки славянской культуры (‘Languages of Slavic Culture’) publishing house in Moscow. The studies in Key Ideas of the Russian Linguistic Worldview were inspired by the work of Anna Wierzbicka, most notably her Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, Japanese (Oxford University Press, 1997). The idea behind the volume is that language communities operate with a ‘linguistic picture …

Review: Will Bagley, Ed., “The Whites Want Every Thing”: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877. Vol. 16 Of Kingdom In The West: The Mormons And The American Frontier. Norman: University Of Oklahoma Press, 2019., Katrina Phillips

Mormon Studies Review

In the foreword to Will Bagley’s “The Whites Want Every Thing”: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877, Floyd O’Neil highlights how integral American Indians have been in Latter-day Saint doctrine—and history. Additionally, he contends that a dearth of available Mormon-created sources has left a gap in the scholarship on the long history of the relationships between Latter-day Saints and Indians in the American West. While some encounters were “routine” or “lacking in conflict,” to quote O’Neil, contestations over resources in places such as the Utah Valley led to more violent and protracted battles that would stretch into the twenty-first century (17). “The Whites …

"Tried Even As Abraham", Kevin L. Tolley

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

In a revelation given through the Prophet Joseph Smith in December 1833, the Lord said that the persecuted Saints in Missouri “must needs be chastened and tried, even as Abraham, who was commanded to offer up his only son. For all those who will not endure chastening, but deny me, cannot be sanctified” (Doctrine and Covenants 101:4–5). [1] The road to sanctification requires many steps and is not the result of a single Abrahamic trial. As Elder Richard G. Scott taught, an “absolute requisite of ‘a broken heart and a contrite spirit’ prescribes the need to be submissive, compliant, humble …

"The Lord Hath Made Bare His Holy Arm" Nephite Treatments Of Isaiah 52:7-10, Matthew Scott Stenson

Religious Educator: Perspectives on the Restored Gospel

The Book of Mormon deliberately draws its readers’ attention to the writings of Isaiah from beginning to end.[1] The Nephites had access to these writings by means of the brass plates obtained from Laban. Much of the book of Isaiah can be found quoted, paraphrased, or alluded to in the pages of the Nephite record.[2]

Biblical Hesed And Nephite Covenant Culture, Noel B. Reynolds

BYU Studies

The devastating late-nineteenth-century attack on traditional assumptions concerning the preexilic dating of the Pentateuch may have provoked the eventual explosion of twentieth-century scholarly investigation of the covenant culture of the Old Testament. Covenantal texts related to Abraham, Moses, David, and others had long been assumed to be foundational for the religion of ancient Israel, however limited modern understanding of that covenant culture might have been. But the new scholarly paradigm that dated those texts to 621 BC or later gave rise to a wave of skeptical scholarship about the whole tradition of divine covenants as the basis for ancient Israelite …

Marrying Principles Of Religious Freedom With Equitable Teaching Practices For Latter-Day Saint Public Educators, Derek R. Riddle

BYU Studies

A couple of years ago, a colleague recommended I read a young adult novel titled How It Went Down authored by Kekla Magoon. This fictional novel tells the tragic story of Tariq Johnson, a sixteen-year-old fatally shot by a police officer. The story, written from a multicharacter perspective, creates an intentional effect through which the reader may find it challenging to discover the truth about the book’s pivotal event because of the varied perspectives and accounts of its many characters. As a former secondary-school English teacher who taught in settings where conversations regarding police brutality and racial profiling were prevalent, …

The Good, The Bad, And The Violent: Analyzing Beowulf’S Heroic Displacement And Transgressive Violence During The Grendel Quest, Jessie Bonafede

Quidditas

Heroic actions are often associated with altruistic feats of humanitarianism, but in Beowulf, the connection between heroism and performative acts of violence reveal significant complications concerning how the poem codifies violence for social honor. A central conflict arises with the poem’s contrasting presentation of Beowulf’s dominance and physical power before and during the Grendel quest with the relatively low social status he incurs amongst his maternal kin group, the Geats. In this paper, I use anthropological and sociological theories of collective violence and dominance versus prestige hierarchies to rethink how violence interplays with the poem’s treatment of lineage and other …

Contemporary History In Early Tudor English Chronicles: 1485-1553, Barrett L. Beer

Quidditas

English chronicles published between 1485 and 1547 are studied here to determine how they dealt with contemporary history. These chronicles obviously covered the distant past, but many end well before the date of publication. Today contemporary history is of great importance to the public as evidenced by a variety of published works, periodicals, and most recently the internet. An analysis of early Tudor chronicles reveals that while many were indifferent to the recent past, others clearly laid the foundation for a focus on the contemporary era. The recognized authors of the chronicles included in this study are Richard Arnold, John …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Humorous Spaces And Serious Magic In William Baldwin’S Beware The Cat, Ashley Jeanette Ecklund

Quidditas

When spaces transform in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, the transition is marked with humor, consistently signaling magic to follow. As an amalgamation of folklore, including magic that manifests around, for, and through cats, Baldwin’s work offers adventure, laughter, and danger alike. Some cats are diabolical, worshiping or holding the soul of a witch; however, their wit constitutes a jocular contrast to that of our interior narrator, Maister Streamer, whose quotation above demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of St. Augustine’s beliefs. Though Beware The Cat was published at the start of the early modern period, the folklore it contains speaks …

“Same-Sex Marriage?! What Next Polygamy?”: Mormonism In Us Political Culture, K. Mohrman

Mormon Studies Review

In his dissent to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision

that determined marriage was a right that could not be constitutionally

denied to same-sex couples under the Free Exercise and

Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, Chief Justice

John Roberts queried, “if ‘[t]here is dignity in the bond between

two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to

make such profound choices,’ . . . why would there be any less dignity

in the bond between three people, who in exercising their autonomy,

seek to make the profound choice to marry?”1 In …

Margarito Bautista, Mexican Politics, And The Third Convention, Elisa Eastwood Pulido

Mormon Studies Review

In 1935, after a twenty-five-year residency in the United States, Margarito
Bautista, a well-known evangelizer of Mexican and Mexican American
Mormons on both sides of the US-Mexico border, repatriated to Mexico.
Bautista had converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
in central Mexico in 1901. Of particular appeal to Bautista and his family
were Book of Mormon narratives offering an exceptional spiritual identity
to Indigenous Americans as lost members of the House of Israel and
promising them a glorious future destiny. Motivated by a desire to know
more about the religious movement he had joined, Bautista relocated …

Does Being Liberal Push Some Members Out Of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints?, Jana Riess, Benjamin Knoll

Mormon Studies Review

Conservative religionists’ political activism is pushing some Americans, particularly younger ones, out of religion altogether. Disgusted by what they see as an unholy merger between the Republican Party and the Religious Right, these people are voting with their feet—not only avoiding Republican affiliation but also wanting nothing to do with organized religion. Such is the argument, at least, of a growing number of scholars and researchers who track the intersection between religion and politics in the United States. Is this claim true? And if so, how does it play out with members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day …

Review: Hayes Peter Mauro. Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation In America. Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 2019., Sarah Dees

Mormon Studies Review

In Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America, art historian Hayes Peter Mauro analyzes images of Native Americans and non-Natives produced within the context of evangelical Christian movements in the United States. While some of the images he examines are what we would usually define as “art”—visual works created by artists for aesthetic purposes—he considers other examples of visual culture as well, including historical and scientific illustrations, photographs, and images found in government documents, forty-six of which are reproduced in the text. These images share a common theme: they depict different categories of people—of (Native) American, European, and African descent—and …

The Fable As A Global Genre: Marie De France, Ulrich Bonerius, Don Juan Manuel, And Kalila And Dimna, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

As much as recent scholarship has tried to develop a new approach toward world or global literature, the essential problem continues that in those efforts simply writers and poets from the various countries and continents are placed side by side without any consideration of inter- and transdisciplinarity, if not shared meaning and critical exchange. Drawing from the tradition of medieval fable literature, however, we face a truly productive approach in recognizing what global literature could really entail since the various writers across the continents addressed, broadly speaking, the same issues and fundamentally agreed on the critical values in all of …

Coming Down And Bringing Down: Pejorative Onomastic Allusions To The Jaredites In Helaman 6:25, 6:38, And Ether 2:11, Matthew L. Bowen

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Mormon uses pejorative wordplay on the name Jaredites based on the meaning of the Hebrew verb yārad. The onomastic rhetoric involving the meaning of yārad first surfaces in Helaman 6 where Mormon also employs wordplay on the name Cain in terms of qānâ or “getting gain.” The first wordplay occurs in the negative purpose clause “lest they should be a means of bringing down [cf. lĕhôrîd] the people unto destruction” (Helaman 6:25) and the second in the prepositional phrase “until they had come down [cf. yārĕdû/yordû] to believe in their works” (Helaman 6:38). Mormon uses these pejorative wordplays as a …

A Complicated Affair Of Twentieth Century Southeast Asia, Nhi Phan

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

January 7, 2021 marked the 42nd anniversary of the Vietnamese army and allied forces of Cambodian general Hun Sen overthrowing Pol Pot. Although this invasion took a mere two weeks, the consequences lasted for more than ten years with huge losses for both the Vietnamese and Cambodians. After 1975, Indochina has gone through many changes with different regimes; its geography, however, has remained the same. Even though both Vietnam and Cambodia became communist regimes after winning their independence from France in 1975, they experienced different changes in political ideology. The shift in regime also brought along border conflicts between the …

Full Issue

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

No abstract provided.

An Ingenious And Inspiring Literary Analysis Of Alma 30–42, Blake T. Ostler

Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Mark A. Wrathall’s analytic treatment of Alma 30–42 is a sheer gift that inspires insight into the theological depth of Alma’s thought. His reading of Alma teases out insights not previously recognized and not easily discovered regarding belief and knowledge and their relation to faith and committed action. This extremely rewarding introduction provides a glimpse at the best any writer in the Latter-day Saint tradition has written on Alma’s thoughts and goals.

Beautiful Dannebrog, Nebraska, Christie Jensen Gehringer

The Bridge

In June, a yearly festival is held in Dannebrog, Nebraska, in conjunction with Grundlovsdag (Danish Constitution Day). The festival, which observes Denmark’s independence and honors the town of Dannebrog, named for Denmark’s flag, began in 1987. Dannebrog celebrates its Danish Days, known as Grundlovsfest, every year during the first weekend in June; however, the festival was previously held from the late 1800s through the 1930s when it was called Gorbennad (Dannebrog spelled backwards). Driving down the main street in Dannebrog today one can find an antique store, an ice cream shop, and a bakery, which showcase the town’s Danish …

To Opi Or Not To Opi: Proficiency-Oriented Instruction And Assessment In U.S. University-Level Russian Programs, Oleksandra Wallo, Molly Godwin-Jones

Russian Language Journal

Back in 1991, Thompson claimed that the impact of the proficiency movement on how Russian was taught in the United States had resulted in something more akin to Soviet glasnost rather than perestroika. She meant that while the introduction of ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and an emphasis on functional ability in a foreign language spurred much discussion in the Russian teaching profession in the 1980s, these developments did not lead to “the actual restructuring of curricula and assessment along functional lines” (375). Thompson mentioned several obstacles to the adoption of the proficiency-based approach for Russian teaching at that time, including …

From Error Annotation To Quantitative Analysis: Patterns In Russian Language Learning, Irina Kor Chahine, Ekaterina Uetova

Russian Language Journal

Although learner corpus research has been progressively growing into an independent branch of corpus linguistics, the learner corpus cannot yet fully benefit from corpus analysis methods. This is due to several technical obstacles involving data collection, error annotation, and finally, data processing. When it comes to data collection, compared to corpus linguistics, learner corpus is biased because some of the learner corpora are still collected manually: Optical character recognition (OCR) is not yet sophisticated enough to transform a student’s handwritten copy to a digitized text. This fact significantly slows the collection of learner corpora. Furthermore, typed students’ texts present another …

Front Matter

BYU Studies

No abstract provided.