Digital Commons Network^™

Challenges Associated With Municipal Curbside Recycling In Matsudo City, Chiba, Japan, Jasmine Frazier

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

Improper waste disposal and management globally is linked to a variety of problems with the environment and health. This problem can be addressed by following the 3 R’s; reduce, reuse, and recycle. Japan is continually aiming towards becoming a sustainable, recycling oriented society with the implementation of the 3 R’s, reducing GHG emissions, and innovating new technologies for recycling and waste management. This research aims to expand the knowledge on the challenges and ways to improve curbside recycling systems and to be able to provide suggestions for improvements to the system with input from Japanese middle school students from a …

Historical Common Names Of Great Plains Plants, With Scientific Names Index. Volume I: Common Names, Elaine Nowick

Zea E-Books Collection

Containing thousands of entries of both vernacular and scientific names of Great Plains plants, the literature that informs this exhaustive listing spans nearly 300 years. Author Elaine Nowick has drawn from sources as diverse as Linnaeus, Lewis and Clark, and local university extension publications to compile the gamut of practical, and often fanciful, common plant names used over the years. Each common name is accompanied by a definitive scientific name with references and authority information. Interspersed with scientifically-correct botanical line drawings, the entries are written in standard ICBN format, making this a useful volume for scholars as well as lay …

Historical Common Names Of Great Plains Plants, With Scientific Names Index. Volume Ii: Scientific Names Index, Elaine Nowick

Zea E-Books Collection

Containing thousands of entries of both vernacular and scientific names of Great Plains plants, the literature that informs this exhaustive listing spans nearly 300 years. Author Elaine Nowick has drawn from sources as diverse as Linnaeus, Lewis and Clark, and local university extension publications to compile the gamut of practical, and often fanciful, common plant names used over the years. Each common name is accompanied by a definitive scientific name with references and authority information. Interspersed with scientifically-correct botanical line drawings, the entries are written in standard ICBN format, making this a useful volume for scholars as well as lay …

Moisés Sáenz: Vigencia De Su Legado (English Translation), Edmund T. Hamann

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

This book mainly offers the biography of Moisés Sáenz (1888-1941), founding architect of Mexico's system of public schooling and former student of John Dewey, describing in particular his roles in creating rural schools, initiating bilingual education (for Mexico's indigenous populations), and experimenting with linkages between schooling and community development. The volume also includes the author's reflection on the relevance of learning about Profr. Sáenz for his own intellectual trajectory (which includes studying the movement of students between Mexico and the US) and reflections by Mexican educators Humberto Leal Martinez and Juan Sánchez García.

The Cultural Integration Experience Of Chinese Immigrant Teachers In The United States: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, Andrew W. Hustad

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The focus of this phenomenological study was the cultural integration experience of Chinese immigrant language teachers into US culture in general, and more specifically how they navigated a new educational culture upon entering the classroom. The need to conduct this study emerged from the researcher’s involvement with the multi-year Nebraska Chinese Acquisition Project FLAP grant. A key element of this grant focused on summer residential professional development institutes for teachers of Chinese in an effort to further develop and expand Chinese language programs in Nebraska public schools. Data collected by the researcher identified vast differences between the educational cultures of …

Taphonomic Considerations For The Analysis Of Parasites From Archaeological Contexts, Johnica J. Morrow, Dario Piombino-Mascali, Karl J. Reinhard

Harold W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology: Faculty Publications

Discusses the role of taphonomy in archaeaoparasitology investigations. Enumerates various factors involved in preservation techniques. Gives cases from Lithuania, Belgium, and Italy. Concludes that considering the taphonomic factors associated with archaeological materials is a vital component in the interpretation of archaeoparasitological data.

Pathways Of Influence: Chinese Parents’ Expectations, Parenting Styles, And Child Social Competence., Lixin Ren, Carolyn P. Edwards

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

This study examines relations among parental expectations for children’s development of social-emotional skills, parenting styles, and child social competence. A total of 154 parents with preschool-aged children from mainland China completed questionnaires measuring their timing of expectations for children’s mastery of social-emotional skills, values placed on social-emotional skills, parenting styles, and child social competence. Parenting styles were found to mediate the effects of parental expectations on child social competence. Parents with earlier expectations reported higher levels of authoritative parenting,which in turn related to better parent-reported child social competence. Parents who placed more values on social-emotional skills were more likely to …

A Research Framework For The Geographic Study Of Exotic Pet Mammals In The Usa, Gabrielle C. Tegeder

Department of Geography: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Exotic animals are not well-represented in geographic studies, even in the emerging sub-field of animal geography. With the dearth of exotic animal studies, and the relevance of exotic pets in the public consciousness and in the news, a basic, introductory study such as this is necessary to begin examining the myriad ways in which exotic pets intersect with, and have influence in, both the site and situation of modern human-oriented environments.

Exotic pet attack incidents and both state and federal laws regarding the private ownership of exotic mammals as pets were examined in detail within the scope of this research. …

New Voices For Old Words, David J. Costa

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

New Voices for Old Words is a collection of previously unpublished Algonquian oral traditions featuring historical narratives, traditional stories, and legends that were gathered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collection presents them here in their original languages with new English-language translations. Accompanying essays explain the importance of the original texts and their relationships to the early researchers who gathered and, in some cases, actively influenced these texts. Covering the northeast United States, eastern Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the Great Plains, the Algonquian languages represented in New Voices for Old Words include Gros Ventre, Peoria, …

"Fighting Over A Shadow?": Hellenistic Greek Cities And Greco-Roman Cities As Fora And Media For Multi-Level Social Signaling, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The cities of Hellenistic western Anatolia and Roman Asia Minor served as fora for complex social, economic, and political transactions. This chapter introduces social signaling theory in which these transactions are considered as social signals emitted by individuals (i.e., citizens) and groups (i.e., cities) and emphasizes the different qualities of these signals, especially their materiality and differential costliness. Social signals convey information about the otherwise difficult-to-assess capabilities of individual and groups; only some have the talents or resources to emit a high-quality signal. At the individual level, the nature, location, and possibly size of a civic benefaction signal’s an individual’s …

The House Of Our Ancestors: New Research On The Prehistory Of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, A.D. 800–1200, Carrie Heitman

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

In a paper honoring the career of archaeologist Gwinn Vivian presented at the Society for American Archaeology 70th annual meeting, Toll and others (2005) discussed the still often-overlooked role of small house sites in Chacoan prehistory. They pointed out that many of the attributes we reserve for the category of “great house” are in fact present at some small house sites and that both the diversity and overlapping characteristics across this dichotomy require greater attention if we are to understand “how Chaco worked.” In this chapter, I present contextual data from 12 house assemblages through a comparative theoretical and ethnographic …

Fisher And Diver Perceptions Of Coral Reef Degradation And Implications For Sustainable Management, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Jeremy B.C. Jackson

United States Department of Commerce: Staff Publications

Fishers and divers are the major resource users of Caribbean coral reefs. On Curaçao and Bonaire, reef condition is good relative to the Caribbean average, but fishes and corals have greatly declined over the last few decades. We interviewed 177 fishers and 211 professional SCUBA divers to assess their views on the extent and causes of degradation. Fishers know fish stocks are severely depleted and declining, whereas divers were aware of declines but had ‘‘shifted baselines’’ and consider the reefs healthy. Fishers and divers differ in perceptions of the causes and appropriate remedies for decline. Fishers generally blame external factors …

Pod Network News Winter 2015

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: POD Network News

President's Message

Notes from the POD Office

Conference News

Conference Awards

Election Results

Committee Updates

Journal Updates

Institute Announcements

Special Column: Small Colleges Committee

POD Essays on Teaching Excellence

Contact the Editor

Educating Pastoralists And Extension Officers On Diverse Livestock Diseases In A Changing Environment In Tanzania, Christopher Gustafson, Elizabeth Vanwormer, Rudovick Kazwala, Asha Makweta, Goodluck Paul, Woutrina Smith, Jonna A. K. Mazet

Department of Agricultural Economics: Faculty Publications

East African pastoralists and their livestock are vulnerable to alterations in resource availability and disease transmission and frequently face poor access to livestock health services. Government veterinarians tasked with guiding health services must prioritize livestock health risks and allocate limited resources across disparate ecosystems with different disease threats. To identify livestock diseases of concern and strategies for improving herd health and resilience, we conducted community focus groups with pastoralists and interviewed pastoralist household leaders, village extension officers, and government veterinary officials in south-central Tanzania, an area experiencing rapid population growth and environmental change. All participants discussed pastoralist access to livestock …

Series Editors' Foreword: The Construction, Negotiation, And Representation Of Immigrant Student Identities In South African Schools (Vandeyar & Vandeyar)., Edmund T. Hamann, Rodney Hopson

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

As much as there are reasons for optimism as one thinks about changes in South Africa, Africa, and the United States in relation to the transcendence of racial differentiation and hierarchy, this book is a reminder of how both harrowing and incomplete that journey is. This book, a crucial addition from the Global South to the scholarship on immigrant students' schooling, depicts how salient and fraught racial identity, both asserted and ascribed, continues to be for the negotiation of school in South Africa. Immigrant students are loathed and marginalized for their accents and 'foreign' ways, and yet they are also …

Erratum: The Socioecology Of Monk Parakeets: Insights Into Parrot Social Complexity, Elizabeth A. Hobson, Michael L. Avery, Timothy F. Wright

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Our recent work on Monk Parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus) reported dominance steepness values that were inaccurate because of a bug in the analysis program. Updated steepness values are more moderate than initially reported, which places captive Monk Parakeet groups midway between egalitarianism and despotism.

Honors Inquiry In Ireland: Developing A Research-Based Study Abroad Experience For Honors Students, Steven Engel, Howard Keeley

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Honors programs and colleges have long placed experiential education at the core of their missions (Braid and Long). As universities have made experiential learning opportunities available to more and more of their students, a question arises about what makes honors experiential learning distinctive (Donahue). In the university-wide honors program at Georgia Southern University, we asked this question about honors study abroad offerings. With a limited staff and budget, we needed a good rationale for the honors program to develop and run a study abroad experience. Such an experience would need to provide experiential learning that would be distinctive in a …

An Integrated Learning Experience, Dennis R. Harkins

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Defining the practical and theoretical context of honors programs and courses in today’s complex educational climate is challenging. Many institutions have used budget shortages to make decisions to reduce honors offerings that are not in the best interest of the students. Funding for honors programs may seem to be extraneous, but these programs provide a pathway for students to excel academically, establish a higher academic bar, and pursue their personal areas of interest while distinguishing themselves as unique learners. Honors programs allow highly motivated students to navigate across the curriculum and to integrate subject matters at a higher level of …

Thinking And Rethinking: The Practical Value Of An Honors Education, James Herbert

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

While teaching in the general honors program of the University of Maryland (1970–1980), I passed on a version of the education I had received in history, philosophy, literature, politics, theology, psychology, anthropology, and the other liberal arts. As I moved into another career, my situation reversed the old chestnut: I couldn’t teach, so I had to find a way to do. I had often professed that a liberal education in honors was good preparation for life. My work life ended up testing that proposition and confirming it in unexpected ways that may be illuminating to those who are now supporting …

Educational Language Planning And Policy In Nebraska: An Historical Overview, Kristine M. Sudbeck

The Nebraska Educator: A Student-Led Journal

Historically, educational language policies have been utilized in order to eradicate, subjugate, and marginalize certain language varieties. Therefore, they have become "instruments of power that influence access to educational and economic resources" (Johnson, 2013, p. 54). More recently, educational language policies have also been used to "develop, maintain, and promote" minoritized languages (p. 54). The role of language policy and planning with educational settings, therefore, should be crtiically examined. This manuscript features two key components. First, the term language planning and policy will be (re) conceptualized as both a field of inquiry and a social practice involving three core activities …

An Exploration Of Voice In Second Language Writing, Dwi Riyanti

The Nebraska Educator: A Student-Led Journal

Writing with strong voice is desirable in the U.S. mainstream culture, yet it is not necessarily easy to accomplish it. This is even harder for second language writers who are new to the culture. The different cultural expectation and the knowledge of the language presumably become some of the obstacles for them to write in the expectation of the U.S. mainstream. Even the notion of voice in writing itself is often confusing. This paper, focusing on exploring what voice is and how it is manifested in second language writing, reviews related literature on voice and second language writing research as …

Self-Represented Litigants And Civil Case Dispositions In Missouri: An Impact Analysis, Anne Dannerbeck Janku, Joseph A. Vradenburg

Court Review: Journal of the American Judges Association

Access to justice is an important issue for the Missouri judiciary as it is for many other states. The issue fostered several recent national initiatives,1 including a 2010 Department of Justice Access to Justice Initiative.2 Part of the agenda for that initiative involves identifying ways to ensure fair and just outcomes for all parties to a case. Some observers of the judicial system have expressed concern that self-represented litigants may not experience fair and just outcomes. As part of Missouri’s own access-to-justice initiatives, this study was undertaken to understand how self-representation impacts outcomes in civil cases.

About half the cases …

Creating A Supportive Teaching Culture In The Research University Context: Strategic Partnering And Interdisciplinary Collaboration Between A Teaching Centerand Academic Units, Marie Kendall Brown, Patricia A. S. Ralston, Kathy B. Baumgartner, Melissa A. Schreck

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This paper describes 2 “strategic partnering” and “interdisciplinary collaboration” case studies between a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and an academic unit at a mid-sized metropolitan research university in the American Midwest. These faculty development partnerships were developed to meet the unique needs of faculty members who share a discipline area, present current information on specific teaching topics in order to deepen pedagogical knowledge and skills, provide opportunities for faculty to form a collegial group, and advance unit-specific goals relative to faculty development. The work is grounded in literature about the characteristics of a supportive teaching culture, characteristics of …

Multilevel Modeling Analysis Of Dyadic Network Data With An Application To Ye’Kwana Food Sharing, Jeremy Koster, George Leckie, Andrew Miller, Raymond B. Hames

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Behavioral ecologists have recently begun using multilevel modeling for the analysis of social behavior. We present a multilevel modeling formulation of the Social Relations Model that is well suited for the analysis of dyadic network data. This model, which we adapt for count data and small datasets, can be fitted using standard multilevel modeling software packages. We illustrate this model with an analysis of meal sharing among Ye’kwana horticulturalists in Venezuela. In this setting, meal sharing among households is predicted by an association index, which reflects the amount of time that members of the households are interacting. This result replicates …

The Relevance Of Maize Pollen For Assessing The Extent Of Maize Production In Chaco Canyon, Carrie C. Heitman, Phil R. Geib

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Opinion is hardly unanimous, but many authors endorse the idea that Chaco Canyon is and was a marginal place for growing corn (Zea mays), a chief source of food energy for Puebloan groups in the Southwest. Poor soils with “toxic” levels of salts, inadequate and unpredictable precipitation, and a short growing season have all been identified as contributing to the agricultural marginality of the place (Benson 2011a; Bryan 1954; Force et al. 2002; Judd 1954:59–61). Benson has been the most vocal proponent of this view of late, and his research has culminated in the conclusion that “the San Juan Basin, …

The Cultural Adaptation Process During A Short-Term Study Abroad Experience In Swaziland, Nathan W. Conner, T Grady Roberts

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication: Faculty Publications

Globalization continuously shapes our world and influences post-secondary education. This study explored the cultural adaptation process of participants during a short-term study abroad program. Participants experienced stages which included initial feelings, cultural uncertainty, cultural barriers, cultural negativity, academic and career growth, feelings throughout the program, and cultural growth. The findings from this study should be used to design and implement short-term study abroad programs that infuse cultural learning with academic learning and focus on experiential learning practices.

Procedural Modeling For Ancient Maya Cityscapes: Initial Methodological Challenges And Solutions, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Rachel Plessing

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Digital reconstruction of 3D cityscapes is expensive, time-consuming, and requires significant expertise. We need a 3D modeling approach that streamlines the integration of multiple data types in a time-efficient and low-cost manner. Procedural modeling—rapid proto-typing of 3D models from a set of rules— offers a potential solution to this problem because it allows scholars to create digital reconstructions that can be quickly updated and used to test and formulate alternative hypotheses that are derived from and linked to underlying archaeological data. While procedural modeling is being used to visualize ancient Roman, Etruscan, and Greek cities, in the Maya region the …

Piophilidae Distribution In Consideration Of Forensic Applications, Electra Ragan

Department of Entomology: Distance Master of Science Projects

Notes on Decomposition

Decomposition as understood by our ancestors has mystical overtones with foggy roots; the reasons behind the beliefs are not readily understood from a twenty-first-century westerner’s perspective. Gases that built up inside the deceased and oozing fluids from the membranes were explained away as flesh-eating vampires after a night’s feasting (they were bloated and full). Freshly culled meat became a source to maggots and flies as it aged, transferring its “life force” from one being into another (Sachs 2001). A mere century or two ago, Louis Pasteur would be the first westerner to directly link “moulds, mucors and …

Geophysical Investigations Of Three Sites Within The Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, Mercer County, North Dakota, Steven L. De Vore

United States National Park Service: Publications

The National Park Service’s Midwest Archeological Center staff and instructors and participants of the 2010 NPS archeological prospection workshop, along with students from the University of North Dakota’s 2010 fieldschool conducted geophysical investigations at three sites within Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site in Mercer County, North Dakota. The geophysical investigations were conducted between May 10 and May 29, 2010. The investigations at the Elbee site, 32ME408, and Site 32ME2377 were requested by the KNRI superintendent as part of the compliance activities related to the erosion of the Knife River bank in the vicinity of the two sites. The …

Mesh Ora Framework: R/Bioconductor Packages To Support Mesh Over-Representation Analysis, Koki Tsuyuzaki, Gota Morota, Manabu Ishii, Takeru Nakazato, Satoru Miyazaki, Itoshi Nikaido

Department of Animal Science: Faculty Publications

Background: In genome-wide studies, over-representation analysis (ORA) against a set of genes is an essential step for biological interpretation. Many gene annotation resources and software platforms for ORA have been proposed. Recently, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms, which are annotations of PubMed documents, have been used for ORA. MeSH enables the extraction of broader meaning from the gene lists and is expected to become an exhaustive annotation resource for ORA. However, the existing MeSH ORA software platforms are still not sufficient for several reasons.

Results: In this work, we developed an original MeSH ORA framework composed of six types of …