Digital Commons Network^™

A Pragmatic Assessment Of Government Support For Organic Agriculture In Ireland, Leslie Duram

Publications

Drawing on a pragmatic approach, this paper provides an analysis of governmental support for organic farming in Ireland. There are varying levels of encouragement and programmes provided to farmers in their conversion from conventional to organic production, and in their maintenance of organic production. Support policies vary across regions and are linked to European Union legislation, thus it is challenging to document the many types of support in place. This research investigates relevant technical, financial, and policy support available to organic farmers in Ireland. This exploratory study develops an assessment of Ireland within eight key categories of organic agricultural support: …

Book Review: Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide To Astronomy In The National Parks, T. D. Oswalt

Publications

This document is Dr. Oswalt’s review of Stars Above, Earth Below : a Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks by Tyler Nordgren. Springer/Praxis, 2010 444p, 9781441916488 $29.95.

Uaa Student Showcase Journal: Recognizing Excellence (2010), N/A N/A

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No abstract provided.

Methodological Challenges In The Study Of Social Communication, Scott D. Mcclurg

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This chapter examines how the questions and concepts used in social communications research affect data collection. It begins by offering conceptual definitions of two types of social environments – networks and contexts – that are used to define the boundaries of the field and to highlight its diversity. From this starting point, the implications of these definitions for three methodological issues are discussed: 1) choosing an environmental unit of analysis, 2) selecting cases of social environments for inclusion in a study, and 3) establishing causality. The organizing theme of this chapter is that social communications research is best served by …

Exposing The Underground Establishment Clause In The Supreme Court's Abortion Cases, Justin Murray

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In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court held that women have a right to abortion under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court reasoned toward this conclusion by importing concepts and concerns that are ordinarily associated with the Establishment Clause. This Article is the first attempt to systematically describe, and critically evaluate, the Court's use of Establishment Clause ideas in Roe and later abortion cases.

Some brief background is essential in order to see how the Court wove Establishment Clause themes into the structure of its Due Process analysis. The Due Process Clause prohibits the government …

A Critical Legal Rhetoric Approach To In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation, Lolita Buckner Inniss

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In this paper I apply critical legal rhetoric to the judicial opinion rendered in response to the Defendants' Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs' Second Amended and Consolidated Complaint in 'In Re African American Slave Descendants', a case concerning the efforts of a group of modern-day descendants of enslaved African-Americans to obtain redress for the harms of slavery. The chief methodological framework for performing critical legal rhetorical analysis comes from the work of Marouf Hasian, Jr. particularly his schema for analysis which he calls substantive units in critical legal rhetoric. Critical legal rhetoric is a potent tool for exposing the …

Body And Soul: Equality, Pregnancy, And The Unitary Right To Abortion, Jennifer S. Hendricks

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This Article explores equality-based arguments for abortion rights, revealing both their necessity and their pitfalls. It first uses the narrowness of the "health exception" to abortion regulations to demonstrate why equality arguments are needed--namely because our legal tradition's conception of liberty is based on male experience, no theory of basic human rights grounded in women's reproductive experiences has developed. Next, however, the Article shows that equality arguments, although necessary, can undermine women's reproductive freedom by requiring that pregnancy and abortion be analogized to male experiences. As a result, equality arguments focus on either the bodily or the social aspect of …

Ways Of Seeing In Environmental Law: How Deforestation Became An Object Of Climate Governance, William Boyd

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Few areas of law are as deeply implicated with science and technology as environmental law, yet we have only a cursory understanding of how science and technology shape the field. Environmental law, it seems, has lost sight of the constitutive role that science and technology play in fashioning the problems that it targets for regulation. Too often, the study and practice of environmental law and governance take the object of governance--be it climate change, water pollution, biodiversity, or deforestation--as self-evident, natural, and fully-formed without recognizing the significant scientific and technological investments that go into making such objects and the manner …

Alienated: A Reworking Of The Racialization Thesis After September 11, Ming H. Chen

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This article revises widespread application of the racialization thesis to Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians following September 11. It suggests in its place an “alienation thesis” to describe the formation of an alien identity for those perceived and treated as noncitizens. This thesis draws on Asian American and critical race scholarship to re-interpret sociological understandings of the post-September 11 response to Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians. The article concludes that shifting conceptions of this phenomenon is critical to reforming “alienating” practices that function not only to cause harm to their intended targets, but also to distort the legal requirements of …

What's Love Got To Do With It?: Contemporary Lessons On Lawyerly Advocacy From The Preacher Martin Luther King, Jr., Deborah J. Cantrell

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Lawyers have long been inspired by the advocacy work of Martin Luther King, Jr. From his work on the Montgomery bus boycott, to lunch counter sit-ins, to his March on Washington, Dr. King demonstrated skilled advocacy that resulted in important legal advancements. While lawyers give primacy to Dr. King as an advocate, Dr. King gave primacy to his work as a preacher. This article challenges the legal profession to consider the ways in which Dr. King, the preacher, may be as inspirational and instructive as Dr. King, the civil rights icon. Just as Dr. King's religious values were not abstracted …

Lessons From Mazibuko: Persistent Inequality And The Commons, Daria Roithmayr

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No abstract provided.

Racial Cartels, Daria Roithmayr

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This Article argues that we can better understand the dynamic of historical racial exclusion if we describe it as the anti-competitive work of "racial cartels." We can define racial cartels to include a range of all-White groups-homeowners' associations, school districts, trade unions, real estate boards and political parties who gained significant social, economic and political profit from excluding on the basis of race. Far from operating on the basis of irrational animus, racial cartels actually derived significant profit from racial exclusion. By creating racially segmented housing markets, for example, exclusive White homeowners' associations enjoyed higher property values that depended not …

Innovative Public Engagement Practices And Partnerships: Lifting Stakeholder Voices In Education Accountability Policy, Monica Wills, Curtis Brewer, Robert Knoeppel, James Witte, Roy Pargas, Jane Clark Lindle

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In 2008, due to increasing stakeholder dissatisfaction with assessment results and school report cards, South Carolina revised its 1998 Educational Accountability Act and required public engagement with stakeholders including parents/guardians, educators, business and community leaders, and taxpayers. The legislation created partnerships between SC‟s Education Oversight Committee (EOC) and Clemson University. The project also brought together within the university the fields of Applied Sociology, Computer Science, and Educational Leadership. The project involved mixed methods using phone/web surveys with focus groups eliciting perceptions from key stakeholders and under-represented voices in the surveys.

Item Disaggregation For: Student Behavior From Phone Interviews Public Education Engagement South Carolinians Speak Out, Jane Clark Lindle, James Witte, Robert Knoeppel

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No abstract provided.

Errands Into The Metropolis: New England Dissidents In Revolutionary London, Jonathan Beecher Field

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Errands into the Metropolis offers a dramatic new interpretation of the texts and contexts of early New England literature. Jonathan Beecher Field inverts the familiar paradigm of colonization as an errand into the wilderness to demonstrate, instead, that New England was shaped and re-shaped by a series of return trips to a metropolitan London convulsed with political turmoil. In London, dissidents and their more orthodox antagonists contended for colonial power through competing narratives of their experiences in the New World. Dissidents showed a greater willingness to construct their narratives in terms that were legible to a metropolitan reader than did …

Item Disaggregation For: Student Behavior From Web Survey Public Education Engagement South Carolinians Speak Out, Jane Clark Lindle, James Witte, Robert Knoeppel

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No abstract provided.

Optical Pulsars And Black Arrows: Discoveries As Occasioned Productions, Timothy Koschmann, Alan Zemel

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The current paper represents a methodological proposal. It seeks to address the question of how one might recognize a discovery as a discovery without knowing in advance what is available to be discovered. We propose a solution and demonstrate it using data from a study previously reported by Roschelle (1992). Roschelle investigated two students’ discovery of certain abstract features of Newtonian mechanics while working within a computer-based microworld, the Envisioning Machine. We employ an approach we term discovery-as-occasioned-production to re-examine his data. Such an approach proceeds stepwise from the identification of some matter discovered, working backwards to see just where …

Joining Up The Dots Employment Study, Grangegorman Development Agency

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An Employment Study was recently completed in relation to the Grangegorman Development and the local area. It was carried out in conjunction with several public and community bodies to examine the job opportunities that will arise from the development.

What's New In Legal Education: Experiential Learning, David Getches

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Getches announces Colorado Law's new Schaden Chair in Experiential Learning and explores how the law school is "refining its approach to teaching practical and professional skills" and encouraging integration of experiential techniques in doctrinal courses.

Analysis Of The Supporting Websites For The Use Of Instructional Games In K-12 Settings, Mansureh Kebritchi, Wendi M. Kappers Phd, Atsusi Hirumi, Renee Henry

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This article identifies resources to be included in a website designed to facilitate the integration of instructional games in K-12 settings. Guidelines and supporting components are based on a survey of K-12 educators who are integrating games, an analysis of existing instructional game websites, and summaries of literature on the use of educational software in K-12 settings and teacher technology training. The results indicate that educators face three main challenges when integrating games, including: (a) technical and logistical requirements, (b) curriculum integration, and (c) teacher training. To overcome these challenges, K-12 educators should be provided with: (a) curriculum resources, (b) …

Spam Jurisprudence, Air Law, And The Rank Anxiety Of Nothing Happening (A Report On The State Of The Art), Pierre Schlag

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In 1969, I saw The Endless Summer. It was a surfer movie about two guys (Robert and Mike) who traveled the world in search of the perfect wave. High art -- it was not. Plus the plot was thin. And it's for sure, there weren't enough girls. But there was one line which, for my generation, will go down as one of the all-time great movie lines ever. And always it was a line delivered by some local to Robert and Mike, the surfer dudes, as they arrived on the scene of yet another dispiritingly becalmed ocean. And every …

A Matter Of Context: Social Framework Evidence In Employment Discrimination Class Actions, Melissa Hart, Paul M. Secunda

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In litigation disputes over the certification of employment discrimination class actions, social scientists have come to play a central, yet controversial, role. Organizational behavioralists and social psychologists regularly testify for the plaintiffs, offering what is commonly referred to as social framework testimony. These experts explain the general social science research on the operation of stereotyping and bias in decision making and examine the challenged workplace to identify those policies and practices that research has shown will tend to increase and those that will tend to limit the likely impact of these factors. Defendants fight hard against the admission of social …

Using International Dispute Resolution To Address The Compliance Question In International Law, Anna Spain

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A fundamental critique of international law is that it fails to ensure compliance and, thus, has limited influence on state behavior. Existing compliance theories consider how interests, norms and legal process impact states. Within the legal process school, theories either narrowly define process as methods that achieve a legal aim or broadly consider diplomatic activities without connecting them to the structural elements of process. Thus, despite the prolific scholarship in this area, understanding of how an international dispute resolution process, such as the Six-Party Talks, influences state behavior, such as North Korea’s actions toward nuclear disarmament, remains limited.

To address …

Formalism And Realism In Ruins (Mapping The Logics Of Collapse), Pierre Schlag

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After laying out a conventional account of the formalism vs. realism debates, this Article argues that formalism and realism are at once impossible and entrenched. To say they are impossible is to say that they are not as represented--that they cannot deliver their promised goods. To say that they are entrenched is to say that these forms of thought are sedimented as thought and practice throughout law's empire. We live thus amidst the ruins of formalism and realism. The disputes between these two great determinations of American law continue today, but usually in more localized or circumscribed forms. We see …

Book Review: Tourists In Space: A Practical Guide, T. D. Oswalt

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This document is Dr. Oswalt’s review of Tourists in Space : a Practical Guide by Erik Seedhouse. Springer/Praxis, 2008 314p, 9780387746432 $34.95

Markov Chain Monte Carlo Estimation Of Normal Ogive Irt Models In Matlab, Yanyan Sheng

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Modeling the interaction between persons and items at the item level for binary response data, item response theory (IRT) models have been found useful in a wide variety of applications in various fields. This paper provides the requisite information and description of software that implements the Gibbs sampling procedures for the one-, two- and three-parameter normal ogive models. The software developed is written in the MATLAB package IRTuno. The package is flexible enough to allow a user the choice to simulate binary response data, set the number of total or burn-in iterations, specify starting values or prior distributions for model …

State Rural Development Policy: The Role Of The Community Development Block Grant Program, Robert Blair, Jerry Deichert, David J. Drozd

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A partnership of the federal government and the states implement rural community development policy today, yet researchers rarely examine the nature and efficacy of this extensive intergovernmental collaboration. The authors collected data on Community Development Block Grant awards made by one state to small and rural communities for a variety of development projects over a period of more than ten years, and using a modified rural classification system detected patterns and trends in allocation. This study seeks to determine if a federally funded program assists states address the development needs of a diverse mix of rural communities. Do federal block …

"What Are We Missing?" Usability’S Indexical Ground, Alan Zemel, Timothy Koschmann, Curtis Lebaron, Paul Feltovich

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In this paper, we describe how usability provides the indexical ground upon which design work in a surgery is achieved. Indexical and deictic referential practices are used 1) to constitute participation frameworks and work sites in an instructional surgery and 2) to encode and manage participants’ differential access to the relevancies and background knowledge required for the achievement of a successful surgical outcome. As a site for both learning and work, the operating room afforded us the opportunity to examine how usability, which is a critical design consideration, can be used as a resource for learning in interaction. In our …

Focus On The Future Interview With Dana Beach, 2008, Dana Beach, Donna S. London

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No abstract provided.

Do Off-Campus Students Use E-Books?, Pamela Grudzien, Anne Marie Casey

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The number of electronic books (e-books) that are available is increasing rapidly. Libraries are acquiring them individually, in large groups, and as part of collections. Off-campus librarians perceive them to be the best solution to the problems and expenses related to loaning and shipping print books to off-campus students. This study looks at the usage of e-books by off-campus students at Central Michigan University (CMU) to see if usage patterns can assist librarians with e-book collection development to support off-campus programs.