Digital Commons Network^™

Special Interest Group On Heritage Languages-Fall Newsletter, Theresa Y. Austin, Yvonne Farino, Rosario M. De Swanson, Joy Kreeft Peyton, Wei-Li Hsu

Theresa Y. Austin

News on research and instruction in the world of heritage language education

Climbing The Adaptation Planning Ladder: Barriers And Enablers In Municipal Planning, Elisabeth M. Hamin, Nicole Gurran

Elisabeth M. Hamin

Local municipal governments have a crucial role in helping communities adapt to climate change. Recognizing different levels of climate preparedness, this chapter analyzes what steps communities tend to follow when they move forward on climate adaptation, including prerequisites for planning and the selection of policies. Drawing on content analyses of local climate adaptation plans from the United States (US) and Australia, as well as interviews with municipal planners in both nations, the chapter explores the adaptation policy choices communities are making and explains the range of strategies local governments have used to move forward on a ‘ladder’ of climate adaptation, …

Plant Patents - Presentation To Northfield Garden Club, Paulina Borrego

Paulina Borrego

Plant Patents

Recent Advances In Functional Assays Of Transcriptional Enhancers, Courtney Babbitt, Michele Markstein, Jesse Gray

Michele Markstein

In this special edition of Genomics, we present reviews of the current state of the field in identifying and functionally understanding transcriptional enhancers in cells and developing tissues. Typically several enhancers coordinate the expression of an individual target gene, each controlling that gene's expression in specific cell types at specific times. Until recently, identifying each gene's enhancers had been challenging because enhancers do not occupy prescribed locations relative to their target genes. Recently there have been powerful advances in DNA sequencing and other technologies that make it possible to identify the majority of enhancers in virtually any cell type of …

Social Hierarchies And Public Distribution Of Food In Rural India, Deepankar Basu, Debarshi Das

Deepankar Basu

In this paper, we develop a simple model that shows that consumption of PDS food grains is significantly different between rich and poor households in states where the PDS functions relatively well; in places where the PDS is non-functional, the difference is not significant. Using household-level data from three recent thick rounds of the consumption expenditure survey (2004-2005, 2009-2010 and 2011-2012), we find evidence in support of the predictions from the model. This suggests that one way to make the PDS functional is to make it more accessible to poor and underprivileged households.

Non-Food Expenditures And Consumption Inequality In India, Amit Basole, Deepankar Basu

Deepankar Basu

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about economic inequality in India during the post-reform period. We analyze consumption inequality through the hitherto neglected lens of nonfood expenditure. Using household level consumption expenditure data from the quinquennial “thick” rounds of the NSS, we show that inequality within food and non-food groups has declined, even as overall expenditure inequality has increased over time. We suggest that the rise in overall expenditure inequality is due to the increased weight in the household budget of non-food spending, which tends to be more unequal than food spending. We also show that inequality is very …

American Council On The Teaching Of Foreign Languages-Heritage Language Sig Newsletter, Theresa Y. Austin, Yvonne Farino, Joy Payton

Theresa Y. Austin

An Official Newsletter of ACTFL - August 2015

Amalgamation And The Ideology Of White Supremacy In American Sport, Todd Crosset

Todd Crosset

Prepared for Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: 7th session of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Elaboration of Complementary Standards to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD)

Encouraging Openness At Your Institution: Trends In Open Education And Open Access, Marilyn S. Billings

Marilyn S. Billings

Openness is a major trend that is reshaping scholarship, research, teaching and learning throughout the world. This session focuses in on innovative Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives being led by libraries that promote open access, and emerging opportunities for information professionals to play a critical role in supporting the adoption of open access through open education resources.

The Open Education Initiative At Umass Amherst: Seeking Alternatives To High-Cost Textbooks, Marilyn S. Billings

Marilyn S. Billings

This presentation provides background about open education, the OER movement, and givens information about the open education initiative at UMass Amherst as an example of how an institution can incorporate OERs in the curriculum.

Expanding Research Intelligence Expertise: Library Collaboration With A Faculty Department To Assess Research Performance [Poster], Rebecca Reznik-Zellen, Edwin Boudreaux

Rebecca C. Reznik-Zellen

Academic libraries are expanding their service roles in all aspects of the research enterprise at their institutions, including the assessment of research outputs. Evaluation of research performance is necessary for the successful administration of academic departments and research institutions. Tools that facilitate evaluation are of interest to faculty, administrators, and librarians alike. SciVal, an Elsevier research intelligence product, enables libraries to provide in-depth support for evaluation projects that exceeds the standard fulfillment of requests for Journal Impact Factors and h-Indices. Operating on the cache of bibliographic information housed in the Scopus database, SciVal permits benchmarking of research productivity, impact, and …

When Does Linear Stability Not Exclude Nonlinear Instability?, Panos Kevrekidis, D. E. Pelinovsky, A. Saxena

Panos Kevrekidis

We describe a mechanism that results in the nonlinear instability of stationary states even in the case where the stationary states are linearly stable. This instability is due to the nonlinearity-induced coupling of the linearization’s internal modes of negative energy with the continuous spectrum. In a broad class of nonlinear Schrödinger equations considered, the presence of such internal modes guarantees the nonlinear instability of the stationary states in the evolution dynamics. To corroborate this idea, we explore three prototypical case examples: (a) an antisymmetric soliton in a double-well potential, (b) a twisted localized mode in a one-dimensional lattice with cubic …

Remembrance Of Things Past: Collective Memory, Sensory Perception, And The Emergence Of New Interpretive Paradigms, Neil A. Silberman

Neil A. Silberman

This chapter will examine the historical roots of heritage interpretation from antiquity to its classic modern expression in Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage (1957). It will question the relevance of expert-driven presentation—even with the most politically correct intentions, interactive digital applications, and other mass communications media—in the midst of simultaneous processes of globalization and tribalization that have come to typify the early decades of the 21st century. What new narrative forms are emerging? What new relationships between past and present—between heritage sites and their associated modern communities—will compel a new paradigm of interpretation to emerge? This lecture will examine the …

The New Now: Institutional Repositories And Academia, Marilyn S. Billings

Marilyn S. Billings

This keynote presentation provides a general overview of the changing digital landscape for scholarly communication with an emphasis on the role that institutional repositories play in these changes.

Seeking Alternatives To High-Cost Textbooks: The Umass Amherst Example. Part 1 Of Oer And Libraries: How Can You Help? Webinar, Marilyn S. Billings

Marilyn S. Billings

As part of National Library Week, you are all cordially invited to "OER and Libraries: How Can You Help?," an Affordable Learning Georgia webinar featuring three leading OER librarians from across the nation. Details below: Marilyn Billings (University of Massachusetts at Amherst), Kate Pitcher (SUNY Geneseo), and Cyril Oberlander (Humboldt State University) are three Open Educational Resources pioneers and leaders. All three of them are librarians! Join them in our Affordable Learning Georgia webinar, discussing their roles in OER projects, and how libraries and librarians can support the OER movement.

The Expected Total Curvature Of Random Polygons, Jason Cantarella, Alexander Y. Grosberg, Robert Kusner, Clayton Shonkwiler

Robert Kusner

We consider the expected value for the total curvature of a random closed polygon. Numerical experiments have suggested that as the number of edges becomes large, the difference between the expected total curvature of a random closed polygon and a random open polygon with the same number of turning angles approaches a positive constant. We show that this is true for a natural class of probability measures on polygons, and give a formula for the constant in terms of the moments of the edgelength distribution.

We then consider the symmetric measure on closed polygons of fixed total length constructed by …

Stability And Tunneling Dynamics Of A Dark-Bright Soliton Pair In A Harmonic Trap, E. T. Karamatskos, J. Stockhofe, Panos Kevrekidis, P. Schmelcher

Panos Kevrekidis

http://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.91.043637

Building Your Fan Base: Promoting Your Repository On And Off Campus, Marilyn S. Billings

Marilyn S. Billings

Nearing ten years with their repository initiative, Marilyn Billings and her colleagues have made outreach and the formation of partnerships core to their activities. In her presentation, Marilyn will give a retrospective look at some of the major outreach initiatives and partnerships formed over the past decade, including whom they approached and how. She’ll also provide concrete tips and ideas that you can take back to your own campuses.

Mirror Symmetry For Log Calabi-Yau Surfaces I, Mark Gross, Paul Hacking, Sean Keel

Paul Hacking

We give a cononical sythetic construction of the mirror family to pairs (Y,D) where Y is a smooth projective surface and D is an anti-canonical cycle of rational curves. This mirror family is constructed as the spectrum of an explicit algebra structure on a vector space with canonical basis and multiplication rule defined in terms of counts of rational curves on Y meeting D in a single point. The elements of the canonical basis are called theta functions. Their construction depends crucially on the Gromov-Witten theory of the pair (Y,D)

Highly Nonlinear Wave Propagation In Elastic Woodpile Periodic Structures, Panos Kevrekidis

Panos Kevrekidis

In the present work, we experimentally implement, numerically compute with, and theoretically analyze a configuration in the form of a single column woodpile periodic structure. Our main finding is that a Hertzian, locally resonant, woodpile lattice offers a test bed for the formation of genuinely traveling waves composed of a strongly localized solitary wave on top of a small amplitude oscillatory tail. This type of wave, called a nanopteron, is not only motivated theoretically and numerically, but is also visualized experimentally by means of a laser Doppler vibrometer. This system can also be useful for manipulating stress waves at will, …

The Jcmt Gould Belt Survey: Evidence For Radiative Heating In Serpens Mwc 297 And Its Influence On Local Star Formation, D. Rumble, J. Hatchell, R. A. Gutermuth, H. Kirk, J. Buckle, S.F. Beaulieu, D.S. Berry, H. Broekhoven-Fiene, M.J. Currie, M. Fich, T. Jenness, D. Johnstone, J.C. Mottram, D. Nutter, K. Pattle, J.E. Pineda, C. Quinn, C. Salji, S. Tisi, S. Walker-Smith, J. Di Francesco, M.R. Hogerheijde, D. Ward-Thompson, L.E. Allen, L.A. Cieza, M.M. Dunham, P.M. Harvey, K.R. Stapelfeldt, P. Bastien, H. Bunter, M. Chen, A. Chrysostomou, S. Coude, C.J. Davis, E. Drabek-Maunder, A. Duarte-Cabral, J. Greaves, J. Gregson, W. Holland, G. Joncas, J.M. Kirk, L.B.G. Knee, S. Mairs, K. Marsh, B.C. Matthews, G. Moriarty-Schieven, J. Rawlings, J. Richer, D. Robertson, E. Rosolowsky, S. Sadavoy, H. Thomas, N. Tothill, S. Viti, G.J. White, C.D. Wilson, J. Wouterloot, J. Yates, M. Zhu

Robert A. Gutermuth

We present SCUBA-2 450 and 850 μm observations of the Serpens MWC 297 region, part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) Gould Belt Survey of nearby star-forming regions. Simulations suggest that radiative feedback influences the star formation process and we investigate observational evidence for this by constructing temperature maps. Maps are derived from the ratio of SCUBA-2 fluxes and a two-component model of the JCMT beam for a fixed dust opacity spectral index of β = 1.8. Within 40 arcsec of the B1.5Ve Herbig star MWC 297, the submillimetre fluxes are contaminated by free–free emission with a spectral index …

Dark-Bright Solitons And Their Lattices In Atomic Bose-Einstein Condensates, D. Yan, F. Tsitoura, Panos Kevrekidis, D. J. Frantzeskakis

Panos Kevrekidis

In the present contribution, we explore a host of different stationary states, namely dark-bright solitons and their lattices, that arise in the context of multicomponent atomic Bose-Einstein condensates. The latter are modeled by systems of coupled Gross-Pitaevskii equations with general interaction (nonlinearity) coefficients gij. It is found that in some particular parameter ranges such solutions can be obtained in analytical form, however, numerically they are computed as existing in a far wider parametric range. Many features of the solutions under study, such as their analytical form without the trap or the stability and dynamical properties of one dark-bright soliton even …

Data Informed Approach: Reinstating An Approval Plan, Leslie Horner Button

Leslie Horner Button

No abstract provided.

Uma's Open Education Initiative: Perspective After 4 Years In, Marilyn S. Billings

Marilyn S. Billings

ASERL webinar: Lib-OER Community: Lessons from the Field. In light of growing interest among librarians to support new modes of publishing and lowering the cost of higher education, ASERL is pleased to host a panel of scholarly communication leaders to discuss their experiences in the field of alternative textbooks, a.k.a. Open Educational Resources (OERs). Panel members include Steven Bell (Temple University), Marilyn Billings (UMass Amherst), William Cross (NC State), and Melanie Kowalski (Emory University)

Indentation Of Ultrathin Elastic Films And The Emergence Of Asymptotic Isometry, Dominic Vella, Jianghui Huang, Narayanan Menon, Thomas P. Russell, Benny Davidovitch

Benny Davidovitch

We study the indentation of a thin elastic film floating at the surface of a liquid. We focus on the onset of radial wrinkles at a threshold indentation depth and the evolution of the wrinkle pattern as indentation progresses far beyond this threshold. Comparison between experiments on thin polymer films and theoretical calculations shows that the system very quickly reaches the far from threshold regime, in which wrinkles lead to the relaxation of azimuthal compression. Furthermore, when the indentation depth is sufficiently large that the wrinkles cover most of the film, we recognize a novel mechanical response in which the …

A 24Μm Point Source Catalog Of The Galactic Plane From Spitzer/Mipsgal, R. A. Gutermuth, Mark Heyer

Robert A. Gutermuth

In this contribution, we describe the applied methods to construct a 24 μm based point source catalog derived from the image data of the MIPSGAL 24 μm Galactic Plane Survey and the corresponding data products. The high quality catalog product contains 933,818 sources, with a total of 1,353,228 in the full archive catalog. The source tables include positional and photometric information derived from the 24 μm images, source quality and confusion flags, and counterpart photometry from matched 2MASS, GLIMPSE, and WISE point sources. Completeness decay data cubes are constructed at 1' angular resolution that describe the varying background levels over …

Performance Bounds For Grouped Incoherent Measurements In Compressive Sensing, Adam Polak, Marco Duarte, Dennis Goeckel

Marco Duarte

Compressive sensing (CS) allows for acquisition of sparse signals at sampling rates significantly lower than the Nyquist rate required for bandlimited signals. Recovery guarantees for CS are generally derived based on the assumption that measurement projections are selected independently at random. However, for many practical signal acquisition applications, including medical imaging and remote sensing, this assumption is violated as the projections must be taken in groups. In this paper, we consider such applications and derive requirements on the number of measurements needed for successful recovery of signals when groups of dependent projections are taken at random. We find a penalty …

Is Love (Color) Blind? The Economy Of Race Among White Gay & Straight Daters, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Ken-Hou Lin

Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist

A drawback to research on interracial couplings is that it almost exclusively studies heterosexual relationships. However, compelling new evidence from analyses using the Census shows that interracial relationships are significantly more common among the gay population. It is unclear how much of this reflects weaker racial preference or more limited dating markets. This paper brings unique individual -level data rather than couple-level data to bear on what might be driving the difference. We examine the interactions of white gay and straight online daters who have access to a large market of potential partners by modeling dyadic messaging behaviors. Results show …

Linguistic Identity Among New Speakers Of Basque, Ane Ortega, Jacqueline Urla, Estibalitz Amorrortu

Jacqueline L. Urla

The increase in Basque speakers in the last 30 years has been due in large part to ‘new speakers’ or euskaldunberri, a term that will be used here to refer to those who have learned the language by means other than family transmission. While very significant in numbers, to date this group has not been the object of much study. Little is known about their attitudes and motivations, how they perceive themselves as Basque speakers, or their language use and transmission patterns. Acquiring answers to these questions is of strategic importance for developing an effective evidence-based language policy for the …

Heritage Places: Evolving Conceptions And Changing Forms, Neil A. Silberman

Neil A. Silberman

No abstract provided.