Digital Commons Network^™

Legal And Ethical Issues Around Incorporating Traditional Knowledge In Polar Data Infrastructures, Teresa Scassa, Fraser Taylor

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Human knowledge of the polar region is a unique blend of Western scientific knowledge and local and indigenous knowledge. It is increasingly recognized that to exclude Traditional Knowledge from repositories of polar data would both limit the value of such repositories and perpetuate colonial legacies of exclusion and exploitation. However, the inclusion of Traditional Knowledge within repositories that are conceived and designed for Western scientific knowledge raises its own unique challenges. There is increasing acceptance of the need to make these two knowledge systems interoperable but in addition to the technical challenge there are legal and ethical issues involved. These …

Identifying The Anthropological In A Mixed- Methods Study Of Transnational Students In Mexican Schools, Edmund T. Hamann, Victor Zuniga, Juan Sánchez García

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

Identifying surveying as more commonly sociological and semistructured interviewing as more commonly anthropological, which describes disciplinary histories more than any fixed formulas, we juxtapose transnational students’ survey answers collected in Mexican schools with their answers to interviewers several months later. From this, we consider what can be learned about research methodology and transnational student cosmology when different methods yield discrepant answers. Without claiming superiority for either mechanism, we find their combination illuminating, and it substantiates the claim that anthropological inquiry can add crucial value to mixed-methods, interdisciplinary inquiry.

Changes In The World Of Small Community Banks, Greg Mckee

Cornhusker Economics

Community banks hold a traditional position in financial intermediation. These provide banking services to customers, consumers and small businesses, all within “local” proximity to the bank. They’re also more likely to be privately owned than much larger banks. Local ownership provides a strong incentive to management to balance stakeholder concerns relative to the demands of capital markets. Community banks are categorized, based on asset size, by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as having $10 billion, or less, in assets.

Small community banks, those with $1 billion or less in assets, are most likely to retain the original community bank conceptual …

Carbon Flux Phenology From The Sky: Evaluation For Maize And Soybean, Alexandria G. Mccombs, Cuizhen Wang, Ankur Desai, Andrew E. Suyker, Sebastien C. Bird

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Carbon flux phenology is widely used to understand carbon flux dynamics and surface exchange processes. Vegetation phenology has been widely evaluated by remote sensors; however, very few studies have evaluated the use of vegetation phenology for identifying carbon flux phenology. Currently available techniques to derive net ecosystem exchange (NEE) from a satellite image use a single generic modeling subgroup for agricultural crops. But, carbon flux phenological processes vary highly with crop types and land management practices; this paper reexamines this assumption. Presented here are an evaluation of ground-truth remotely sensed vegetation indices with in situ NEE measurements and an identification …

The Roles Of Ecology, Behavior And Effective Population Size In The Evolution Of A Community., C.M. Hung, S. Drovetski, R. M. Zink

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploring Elementary Students’ Scientific Knowledge Of Agriculture Using Evidence-Centered Design, Molly Brandt, Cory Forbes, Jenny Keshwani

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

The public is more disconnected from agriculture than ever. Americans are now two to four generations removed from the farm with a majority of Americans having no direct experience in agriculture. As a result, the public lacks the knowledge and appreciation of the food, fuel, and fiber it demands. The National Agricultural Learning Objectives (NALOs) were recently developed to describe students’ agricultural knowledge but have, as yet, not been used to guide research into students’ agricultural literacy. The purpose of this project is to further understand students’ agricultural literacy through NALO-based assessment of students’ knowledge. This study focused on the …

Defining Ecological Drought For The Twenty-First Century, Shelley D. Crausbay, Aaron R. Ramirez, Shawn L. Carter, Molly S. Cross, Kimberly R. Hall, Deborah J. Bathke, Julio L. Betancourt, Steve Colt, Amanda E. Cravens, Melinda S. Dalton, Jason B. Dunham, Lauren E. Hay, Michael J. Hayes, Jamie Mcevoy, Chad A. Mcnutt, Max A. Moritz, Keith H. Nislow, Nejem Raheem, Todd Sanford

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

THE RISING RISK OF DROUGHT. Droughts of the twenty-first century are characterized by hotter temperatures, longer duration, and greater spatial extent, and are increasingly exacerbated by human demands for water. This situation increases the vulnerability of ecosystems to drought, including a rise in drought-driven tree mortality globally (Allen et al. 2015) and anticipated ecosystem transformations from one state to another—for example, forest to a shrubland (Jiang et al. 2013). When a drought drives changes within ecosystems, there can be a ripple effect through human communities that depend on those ecosystems for critical goods and services (Millar and Stephenson 2015). For …

The 5e Learning Cycle: What's The Story?, Kelsey Lipsitz, Dante Cisterna, Deborah Hanuscin

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Pathways To Increasing Farmer-Led Investments In Sustainable Agricultural Water Management In Sub-Saharan Africa, Douglas J. Merrey, Peter G. Mccornick, Molly C. Nance

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Without a transformative leap forward in the use of irrigation, Africa will continue falling short in the struggle to feed its growing population, improve its people’s nutrition, grow its economies, adapt to the impacts of climate change, and eliminate poverty. While Africans must lead this transformation for it to be successful, the international community can help African countries substantially increase the use of more productive and sustainable water management practices and unlock the potential of farmer-led irrigated agriculture. Achieving highly productive irrigated agricultural systems in Africa requires an enabling environment that facilitates the full engagement of farmers, public and private …

Provenance Investigations Of Raw Materials In Pre-Columbian Textiles From Pachacamac; Strontium Isotope Analyses, Karin Margarita Frei, Lena Bjerregaard

PreColumbian Textile Conference VII / Jornadas de Textiles PreColombinos VII (2016)

Pachacamac was considered a sanctuary or oracle by several of the pre-Columbian Andean cultures. As a pilgrimage destination, the site was rich in archaeological artifacts and yielded also many well preserved textiles. Some of the objects found at Pachacamac are considered offerings by the pilgrims to their Gods, and the majority are assumed to be of nonlocal origin. Others are from the Ychsma people, who lived in Pachacamac and the nearby Rimac Valley during the last centuries before the conquest. We have investigated 10 pre-Columbian textile samples, which were supposedly excavated at the archaeological site of Pachacamac, Peru. The textiles …

It Follows: Precarity, Thanatopolitics, And The Ambient Horror Film, Casey Ryan Kelly

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In the 2014 horror film It Follows, a teenage woman is terrorized by a fatal curse that passes from victim to victim via sexual intercourse. The subject of the curse is relentlessly pursued by vacant-minded assassins that take the form of friends, loved ones, and strangers. The film is set near the infamous dividing line of Detroit’s 8 Mile Road, between what remains of the suburban working-class and the sacrifice zone of post-industrial urban triage. I argue that It Follows confronts audiences with the spectral manifestation of precarity: the deliberate and unequal redistribution of human fragility to populations who …

Nebraska, Usa: Wonderful Fossils, Natural History Museums And Public Art Depicting Fossils, Robert F. Diffendal Jr.

Robert F. Diffendal, Jr., Publications

Nebraska is known by vertebrate palaeontologists as the place in North America where there is a very complete Cenozoic geologic record of mammalian evolution over the last thirty-five million years or so. All you have to do is visit any of the many major natural history museums in the USA and in many countries around the world, including the UK, to see fossil skulls, articulated skeletons and large slabs of rock containing bones of fossil mammals from Nebraska to verify this assertion. Nebraska is also the site of Cretaceous rocks containing the oldest known Cretaceous fossil flower and many other …

2017 Nebraska Water Monitoring Programs Report, Marty Link, Ryan Chapman

Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality: Reports

The Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality (NDEQ) is charged with monitoring, assessing, and to the extent possible, managing the state’s water resources. The purpose of this work is to protect and maintain high quality water and encourage or execute activities to improve poor water quality. Monitoring is done on nearly 17,000 miles of flowing rivers and streams, more than 134,000 acres of surface water in lakes and reservoirs, as well as the vast storage of groundwater in Nebraska’s aquifers.

A Photosynthesis-Based Two-Leaf Canopy Stomatal Conductance Model For Meteorology And Air Quality Modeling With Wrf/Cmaq Px Lsm, Limei Ran, Jonathan Pleim, Conghe Song, Larry Band, John T. Walker, Francis S. Binkowski

United States Environmental Protection Agency: Publications

A coupled photosynthesis-stomatal conductance model with single-layer sunlit and shaded leaf canopy scaling is implemented and evaluated in a diagnostic box model with the Pleim-Xiu land surface model (PX LSM) and ozone deposition model components taken directly from the meteorology and air quality modeling system—WRF/CMAQ (Weather Research and Forecast model and Community Multiscale Air Quality model). The photosynthesis-based model for PX LSM (PX PSN) is evaluated at a FLUXNET site for implementation against different parameterizations and the current PX LSM approach with a simple Jarvis function (PX Jarvis). Latent heat flux (LH) from PX PSN is further evaluated at five …

Impact Of Menthol Smoking On Nicotine Dependence For Diverse Racial/Ethnic Groups Of Daily Smokers, Julia N. Soulakova, Ryan R. Danczak

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

Introduction: The aims of this study were to evaluate whether menthol smoking and race/ethnicity are associated with nicotine dependence in daily smokers. Methods: The study used two subsamples of U.S. daily smokers who responded to the 2010–2011 Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey. The larger subsample consisted of 18,849 non-Hispanic White (NHW), non-Hispanic Black (NHB), and Hispanic (HISP) smokers. The smaller subsample consisted of 1112 non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN), non-Hispanic Asian (ASIAN), non-Hispanic Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (HPI), and non-Hispanic Multiracial (MULT) smokers. Results: For larger (smaller) groups the rates were 45% (33%) for heavy smoking (16+ cig/day), 59% …

Jewish Terminologies For Fabrics And Garments In Late Antiquity: A Linguistic Survey Based On The Mishnah And The Talmuds, Christina Katsikadeli

Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD

The main texts of the Rabbinic literature, the Mishnah and the Talmuds encompass a wide range of textile and clothing terms embedded in everyday situations as well as in ritual contexts. A great deal of intertextuality shared both by the Mishnah and the Talmuds as well as by other exegetic works like the Tosefta and the early Midrash – not to mention the Bible – makes these texts a valuable source for the investigation of cultural history and language change and contact, even in micro-contexts, in adherence to the traditions and heuristics of historical comparative linguistics, concerning etymology, language change …

Conceptualizing Greek Textile Terminologies: A Databased System, Kalliope Sarri

Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD

One of the major challenges in costume and textile research is dealing with the vast number of terms related to textiles and garments, especially because similar terms are found in different languages and dialects, in various regions and over long periods of time, where they have survived in a complicated network of linguistic and cultural interrelations. There have been many attempts to collect textile terms in glossaries as parts of costume studies or as parts of museum archival projects. These glossaries however are usually limited to specific topics, geographical areas, languages, and time periods.

Creating a diachronic and global costume …

Armenian Karmir, Sogdian Karmīr ‘Red’, Hebrew Karmīl And The Armenian Scale Insect Dye In Antiquity, Agnes Korn, Georg Warning

Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD

This paper looks at three terms denoting the colour ‘red’, viz. Armenian karmir, the obviously corresponding Sogdian word karmīr, and karmīl ‘scarlet’ found in the Hebrew Bible. It will first briefly discuss the etymology of these words (summarising an argument made elsewhere) and argue that the words in question represent a technical term for a red dye from Armenia produced by scale insects. We will then attempt to show that historical data and chemical analysis of extant historical textiles confirm the Armenian red as the relevant dye.

Late Biblical Hebrew karmīl occurs only three times. All three attestations are …

Textilnet.Dk – A Toolkit For Terminology Research And Presentation, Susanne Lervad, Tove Engelhardt Mathiassen

Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD

Since February 2015, the digital dictionary or term database, textilnet.dk, has been accessible on the Internet.1 The purpose of this paper is to present the background and methods of this pilot project. Since 2010, the project has collaborated with The Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Textile Research (CTR), University of Copenhagen, and has gained moral support from Sabine Kirchmeier-Andersen, director of Dansk Sprognævn, the Danish National Language Advisory Committee.2 From 2011 to 2015, we have been working with generous funding from the Danish Ministry of Culture. The objective of textilnet.dk is to preserve and communicate the cultural heritage of …

Socio-Environmental Drought Response In A Mixed Urban-Agricultural Setting: Synthesizing Biophysical And Governance Responses In The Platte River Watershed, Nebraska, Usa, Samuel C. Zipper, Kelly Helm Smith, Betsy Breyer, Jianxiao Qui, Anthony Kung, Dustin Herrmann

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Ensuring global food and water security requires a detailed understanding of how coupled socio-environmental systems respond to drought. Using the Platte River Watershed in Nebraska (USA) as an exemplar mixed urban-agricultural watershed, we quantify biophysical response to drought in urban (Lincoln NE) and agricultural systems alongside a qualitative analysis of governance response and adaptive capacity of both sectors. Synthesis of results highlights parallels and discontinuities between urban and agricultural preparations for and response to drought. Whereas drought prompted an increase in well installations and expansion of water-intensive crops, e.g., corn, in the agricultural sector, outdoor water use restrictions rapidly curtailed …

Democratic Dissent And The Politics Of Rescue During The Twenty-First Century’S “Inhospitable” Eu Migration “Crisis”, Marouf Hasian Jr., José Ángel Maldonado Olivas, Stephanie Marek Muller

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This article uses critical approaches to examine the ways in which dissenters have objected to the European Union’s current “politics of rescue.” The authors argue that the term “hospitality” has been a key term in liberal theorizing about mobility since the Enlightenment, but that various neo-liberal “pull” theories, worries about securitization and the militarization of rescue efforts in the Mediterranean have converged in ways that have turned Europe into an “inhospitable” place for foreigners. The authors use three short case studies—of maritime captains’ and sailors’ rescue efforts, academic critiques of FRONTEX, and vernacular reactions to the iconic Kurdi image—to put …

The January Children, Safia Elhillo

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

In her dedication Safia Elhillo writes, “The January Children are the generation born in Sudan under British occupation, where children were assigned birth years by height, all given the birth date January 1.” What follows is a deeply personal collection of poems that describe the experience of navigating the postcolonial world as a stranger in one’s own land.

The January Children depicts displacement and longing while also questioning accepted truths about geography, history, nationhood, and home. The poems mythologize family histories until they break open, using them to explore aspects of Sudan’s history of colonial occupation, dictatorship, and diaspora. Several …

At The First Table, Jodi Campbell

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Research on European food culture has expanded substantially in recent years, telling us more about food preparation, ingredients, feasting and fasting rituals, and the social and cultural connotations of food.

At the First Table demonstrates the ways in which early modern Spaniards used food as a mechanism for the performance of social identity. People perceived themselves and others as belonging to clearly defined categories of gender, status, age, occupation, and religion, and each of these categories carried certain assumptions about proper behavior and appropriate relationships with others. Food choices and dining customs were effective and visible ways of displaying these …

Unpopular Sovereignty, Brent M. Rogers

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Newly created territories in antebellum America were designed to be extensions of national sovereignty and jurisdiction. Utah Territory, however, was a deeply contested space in which a cohesive settler group—the Mormons—sought to establish their own “popular sovereignty,” raising the question of who possessed and could exercise governing, legal, social, and even cultural power in a newly acquired territory.

In Unpopular Sovereignty, Brent M. Rogers invokes the case of popular sovereignty in Utah as an important contrast to the better-known slavery question in Kansas. Rogers examines the complex relationship between sovereignty and territory along three main lines of inquiry: the …

Lefty O'Doul, Dennis Snelling

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

From San Francisco to the Ginza in Tokyo, Lefty O’Doul relates the untold story of one of baseball’s greatest hitters, most colorful characters, and the unofficial father of professional baseball in Japan.

Lefty O’Doul (1897–1969) began his career on the sandlots of San Francisco and was drafted by the Yankees as a pitcher. Although an arm injury and his refusal to give up the mound clouded his first four years, he converted into an outfielder. After four Minor League seasons he returned to the Major Leagues to become one of the game’s most prolific power hitters, retiring with the fourth-highest …

The Cult Of The Modern, Gavin Murray-Miller

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

The Cult of the Modern focuses on nineteenth-century France and Algeria and examines the role that ideas of modernity and modernization played in both national and colonial programs during the years of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic. Gavin Murray-Miller rethinks the subject by examining the idiomatic use of modernity in French cultural and political discourse. The Cult of the Modern argues that the modern French republic is a product of nineteenth-century colonialism rather than a creation of the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. This analysis contests the predominant Parisian and metropolitan contexts that have traditionally framed French …

Disability Studies And The Environmental Humanities, Sarah Jaquette Ray, Jay Sibara

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between “wild” and “built” environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing “disability.”

Designed as a reader for undergraduate …

Salish Blankets, Leslie H. Tepper, Janice George, Willard Joseph

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Salish Blankets presents a new perspective on Salish weaving through technical and anthropological lenses. Worn as ceremonial robes, the blankets are complex objects said to preexist in the supernatural realm and made manifest in the natural world through ancestral guidance. The blankets are protective garments that at times of great life changes—birth, marriage, death—offer emotional strength and mental focus. A blanket can help establish the owner’s standing in the community and demonstrate a weaver’s technical expertise and artistic vision. The object, the maker, the wearer, and the community are bound and transformed through the creation and use of the blanket. …

Detection And Attribution Of Climate Change, Thomas Knutson, James Kossin, Carl Mears, Judith Perlwitz, Michael Wehner

United States Department of Commerce: Staff Publications

1. The likely range of the human contribution to the global mean temperature increase over the period 1951–2010 is 1.1° to 1.4°F (0.6° to 0.8°C), and the central estimate of the observed warming of 1.2°F (0.65°C) lies within this range (high confidence). This translates to a likely human contribution of 93%–123% of the observed 1951–2010 change. It is extremely likely that more than half of the global mean temperature increase since 1951 was caused by human influence on climate (high confidence). The likely contributions of natural forcing and internal variability to global temperature change over that …

Camera System Considerations For Geomorphic Applications Of Sfm Photogrammetry, Adam R. Mosbrucker, Jon J. Major, Kurt R. Spicer, John Pitlick

United States Geological Survey: Staff Publications

The availability of high-resolution, multi-temporal, remotely sensed topographic data is revolutionizing geomorphic analysis. Three-dimensional topographic point measurements acquired from structure-from-motion (SfM) photogrammetry have been shown to be highly accurate and cost-effective compared to laser-based alternatives in some environments. Use of consumer-grade digital cameras to generate terrain models and derivatives is becoming prevalent within the geomorphic community despite the details of these instruments being largely overlooked in current SfM literature.

A practical discussion of camera system selection, configuration, and image acquisition is presented. The hypothesis that optimizing source imagery can increase digital terrain model (DTM) accuracy is tested by evaluating accuracies …