Digital Commons Network^™

E. Bement & Sons V. National Harrow Company: The First Skirmish Between Patent Law And The Sherman Act, Amelia Rinehart

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In the 1890s, the Sherman Act presented a host of unknowns for patent owners and lax enforcement enabled the proliferation of trusts like the Harrow Trust embodied in the practices of National Harrow. Bement, a profligate license violator, ended up fighting the trust all the way to the Supreme Court, but the surprising outcome left an enduring impression on the interplay between antitrust and patent law. In this way, the case has been both important and forgotten over time. Given the outcome in Actavis, and the possibility for a change of personnel on the Court that may shift it further …

Strategic Communication In Public Schools: A Communication Audit Of A Midwestern School District, Jacqueline Dawn Pleggenkuhle

Communication

School districts are complex organizations which require the use of strategic communication. Measuring the communication from school leaders to their various audiences for message content and alignment has the potential to illuminate the current reality of school communication practices as well as point to areas of needed improvement. The current study measures strategic communication by conducting a communication audit of the fastest growing school district in Iowa, by interviewing 10 school leaders and analyzing essential communication products including 26 web pages and 10 district newsletters. Guided by current research on school communication and branding by universities, the communication audit measures …

Finding The Great Plains People In The “Buffalo Commons” Proposal, Bryce Duane Tellmann

Communication

This thesis argues that Frank and Deborah Popper’s 1987 “Buffalo Commons” proposal urged an exchange of the “plow” for the “buffalo” as the dominant metaphor of Great Plains life. A close textual analysis of the proposal reveals that it constituted the Great Plains “people” through use of Wander’s third persona, and ultimately attempted to promote a collective identity that was starkly opposed to how the current residents viewed themselves, effectively seeking to deconstitute their identity. This mismatch is posited as part of the reason the proposal was received so negatively and continues to be a controversial subject today.

Disseminating Agriculture Information Using The Bbq Boot Camp Model, Austen John Germolus

Animal Sciences

The BBQ Boot Camp program was designed to educate consumers about agriculture production and sustainability, while teaching outdoor cooking methods with meat as the focus. Through the BBQ Boot Camp model, consumer impact was analyzed using a pre- and post-program test. The test questions focused on outdoor cooking, agriculture practices, and food safety issues. Data were collected from 3,112 attendees from 31 BBQ Boot Camps in 2009–2013. Data were analyzed using the MIXED procedure in SAS with fixed effects of year, time, age, sex, and city size (1=population>15k; 2=population between 2.5k-15k; and 3=population<2.5k) and all two-way interactions were tested and removed from the model if P>0.1. Consumer demographics included men and …

The Database Of The Predicts (Projecting Responses Of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems) Project, Lawrence N. Hudson, Tim Newbold, Sara Contu, Samantha L.L. Hill, Igor Lysenko, Adriana De Palma, David J. Flaspohler, Et. Al.

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used this evidence base to develop global and regional statistical models of how local biodiversity responds to these measures. We describe and make freely available this 2016 release of the database, containing more than 3.2 million records sampled at over 26,000 locations and representing over 47,000 species. We outline how the database can help in …

An Alternative Way For Kosovar Adults To Earn A High School Equivalency Diploma: A Case Study, Gjylbehare Llapi

Education

For many years, at the end of the last century, Kosovo was a country plagued with political, social, and economic strife that forced an entire generation of children and young adults to go virtually uneducated. Kosovo is paying a price for that today, with many of its adults finding themselves unskilled, under-educated and unemployed. The central topic and the purpose of the study was to identify possible programming options available to Kosovo’s authorities to increase the number of adults who possess an upper secondary school diploma. After conducting extensive research of possible alternatives offered in a number of countries, this …

Nationalization Of Antiquities: Threats To Human Heritage Posed By Equating Modern Nations With Ancient Counterparts, Jack W. Vachon

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Overreach And Innovation In Equality Regulation, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

At a time of heightened concern about agency overreach, this Article highlights a less appreciated development in agency equality regulation. Moving beyond traditional bureaucratic forms of regulation, civil rights agencies in recent years have experimented with new forms of regulation to advance inclusion. This new "inclusive regulation" can be described as more open ended, less coercive, and more reliant on rewards, collaboration, flexibility, and interactive assessment than traditional modes of civil rights regulation. This Article examines the power and limits of this new inclusive regulation and suggests a framework for increasing the efficacy of these new modes of regulation.

The Civic And Political Engagement Of Latinos In Omaha, Nebraska, Christian Israel Espinosa Torres

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Prior to 2006, Latinos in this country were virtually disregarded as an active political group. However, on May 1, 2006, thousands of immigrants and advocates across the United States marched in major cities to protest proposed immigration laws. In Omaha, Nebraska, alone, it was estimated that community groups energized 15,000 people to march in protest that day. Since the marches, both the number of Latinos and public participation of that group has grown dramatically. But, that growth has not been without its setbacks. While that first display of unity was striking in 2006, many factors have combined to prove that …

Estimating Energy Fluxes And Evapotranspiration Of Corn And Soybean With An Unmanned Aircraft System In Ames, Iowa, Áthila Gevaerd Montibeller

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Evapotranspiration (ET) is a key hydrological variable and has been studies to plan irrigation schedule, understand surface-atmospheric interactions, assess crop sensitivity to droughts, etc. On top of that, ET is a proxy for evaluating water availability in trees canopies and assess soil moisture content. The recent advent of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) has presented new opportunities and challenges in mapping ET at a much finer scale and under various atmospheric conditions. In this research, we integrate traditional remote sensing techniques with the novel UAS technology to estimate ET and surface energy fluxes for a corn and soybean field near …

A Multiscale Assessment Of Wind Energy Resources And Suitability In The Russian Arctic, Narmina Iusubova

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Wind as a renewable and clean source of energy has begun to take a high position in the global dialog about energy production. Today, one of the big questions is to find the most suitable locations for wind farms, with the goal of achieving the highest rates of electricity production possible. In order to find most suitable places to build windfarms, we need to develop multifactor and multiscale dynamic models of windfarm suitability. The interest in the assessment of wind energy suitability in the Russian North regions comes from the expectation of the great potential of wind power in the …

Constructing Identities In The West Branch Landscape: Herbert Hoover's Life And Legacy As A Common Man, 1935-1992, Ryan Lucas Wurtz

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This thesis examines the development of the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, and the town of West Branch's memorialization of Herbert Hoover. The memorialization process of Herbert Hoover's life began with the purchase of his childhood home by his wife, Lou Henry, and son, Allan Hoover in 1935. Backed by the town of West Branch, where the birth site was located, the memorial consisted of the home that Hoover lived in as a child. The Birthplace Society, comprised of leading West Branch community members, expanded the grounds and restored Hoover's father's blacksmith shop in …

The New North: Patents And Knowledge Economy Analysis In Alaska, Salma Zbeed

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

In the last few years, Alaska's economy suffered as world oil prices plunged to very low levels, and the analysts predicting that Alaska output will continue to dwindle in the years to come. As a result of Alaska's dependence on oil economy, the state now faces a budget deficit. Modern economic development theories suggest searching for ways to manage northern frontiers. Investment in a knowledge –based economy seems to be new one of the appealing alternatives, and investing the human capacities is necessary. There is enough evidence from both central and peripheral regions that geographic proximity between the people and …

Spatial Competition In Airport Markets: An Application Of The Huff Model, Joel Heilman

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Airports typically attract travelers from the immediate vicinity, but travelers may be willing to travel farther for better fares and more frequent flights. This study attempts to map the spatial variation of airport catchment areas using the Huff model. This model, originally designed to analyze retail store competition, can be applied to many forms of spatial competition, but it is a relatively unexplored approach in the context of airports. Unlike other air transportation travel choice models, it emphasizes spatial variation in market share and provides spatial representation in the form of a map. It is used in this study to …

What If They're All Terrorists?: The Securitization Of Muslims In Post-9/11 Immigration Policy, Kian Vesteinsson

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis examines U.S. immigrant and refugee policy and policy discourse to understand the formation of Muslims as particular sites of risk as immigrants in the War on Terror. Theorists of international relations theorize securitization as a process in which state actors begin to use the language of security in considering the regulation and governance of a certain policy issue area. I argue that the securitization of various figures who are Muslim or are linked to Muslim-majority countries in post-9/11 immigrant and refugee policy and political discourse contributes to political conditions under which Islam is understood as the only trusted …

Bumper V1.0: A Bayesian User-Friendly Model For Palaeo-Environmental Reconstruction, Philip B. Holden, H. John B. Birks, Stephen J. Brooks, Mark B. Bush, Grace M. Hwang, Frazer Matthews-Bird, Bryan G. Valencia, Robert Van Woeslk

Ocean Engineering and Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

We describe the Bayesian user-friendly model for palaeo-environmental reconstruction (BUMPER), a Bayesian transfer function for inferring past climate and other environmental variables from microfossil assemblages. BUMPER is fully self-calibrating, straightforward to apply, and computationally fast, requiring ~2 s to build a 100- taxon model from a 100-site training set on a standard personal computer. We apply the model’s probabilistic framework to generate thousands of artificial training sets under ideal assumptions. We then use these to demonstrate the sensitivity of reconstructions to the characteristics of the training set, considering assemblage richness, taxon tolerances, and the number of training sites. We find …

Genetic Perspectives On Biodiversity In Rocky Mountain Alpine Streams, Scott Hotaling

Theses and Dissertations--Biology

In alpine regions worldwide, climate change is dramatically altering ecosystems, affecting biodiversity across habitats and taxonomic scales. For streams, the associated recession of mountain glaciers and snowfields, paired with altered precipitation regimes, are driving shifts in hydrology, species distributions, and basal resources – often threatening the very existence of some habitats and biota. Globally, alpine streams harbor particularly substantial species and genetic diversity due to significant habitat insularity and environmental heterogeneity: however, anthropogenic warming threatens to homogenize habitats through the reduction of the cryosphere, thereby reducing biodiversity from micro- to macroscopic organisms and genes to communities. Still, alpine stream biodiversity, …

Science In Fiction: Ethnobotany And The Yearling, Bradley C. Bennett

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature

No abstract provided.

Chicago's Carceral Geographies: Public Housing And Prisoner Reentry In The City, Madeleine Rose Hamlin

Theses - ALL

The Chicago Housing Authority’s recently announced Reentry Pilot allows limited numbers and limited types of ex-offenders to live in Chicago’s public housing for the first time (officially). Through interviews with policymakers, advocates, resident leadership, and service providers, as well as ex-offenders enrolled in or waitlisted for the Pilot, this thesis explores how the various stakeholders envision the goals of this Pilot and what factors they identify that may limit its success. By reshaping housing policy not only for the limited number of ex-offenders included in the Pilot but indeed, by pushing for broader sets of reforms, the Pilot attempts to …

Circling The Reality Of Public Institutions Anchoring Gentrification: An E-Delphi Study Of Information, Culture, And Community Stakeholders Voicing The Way Forward In Detroit, Michigan, Celeste L. Welch

Theses and Dissertations

Information, culture, and memory centers increasingly anchor urban redevelopment projects in historically marginalized communities challenged with contemporary social and economic disparities. This dissertation situated libraries, archives, and museums within a socio-cultural context and examined the role of cultural heritage institutions in gentrification. Librarians, archivists, curators, and community advocates in Detroit, Michigan shared their viewpoints and experiences of gentrification in a legacy city. Using a modified Delphi process, the e-Delphi panel explored the need for assessing policy, service delivery, and programming in a city of color at-risk to gentrification-induced displacement.

This mixed research study used a concurrent triangulation design. A panel …

Climate Change (Mal)Adaptation As Governmentality: The Case Of The Ada Sea Defense System In The Volta River Delta Of Ghana, Kwame Ntiri Owusu-Daaku

Theses and Dissertations

River deltas are complex natural environments that represent a confluence of many physical, biological and human processes vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The likely biophysical impacts of climate change on deltas have received substantial attention. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which the different stakeholders of deltaic environments frame the vulnerability of residents of deltas to climate change. The Volta River Delta (VRD) of Ghana is a compelling site in which to conduct such an examination because of the clear climaterelated changes taking place in the Delta, and the fact that like many …

Meeting The Needs Of Middle Grades Social Studies Students With Language Based Learning Disabilities: An Analysis Of Students’ And Teachers’ Perspectives, Monica J. Hacker Hadwin

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the consistency with which middle level social studies and special education teachers and administrators assist, educate, and guide middle level social studies students with language-based learning disabilities. The study was an inquiry into the students’, teachers’, and administrator’s literacy beliefs and practices and it examined the coherence and congruence among these beliefs and practices.

Conducted as an action research study, it examined the extent of the alignment using data collected from five teachers, six students and one administrator by means of interviews, focus groups, photographs, journal entries, and inventories. The data from …

Faculty Perceptions Of Teaching Information Literacy To First-Year Students: A Phenomenographic Study, Lorna M. Dawes

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

This study examines faculty perceptions of teaching information literacy and explores the influence of these perceptions on pedagogy. The study adopted an inductive phenomenographic approach, using 24 semi-structured interviews with faculty teaching first-year courses at an American public research university. The results of the study reveal four qualitative ways in which faculty experience teaching information use to first year students that vary within three themes of expanding awareness. The resulting outcome space revealed that faculty had two distinct conceptions of teaching information literacy: (1) Teaching to produce experienced consumers of information, and (2) Teaching to cultivate intelligent participants in discourse …

Farmers’ Perspectives On Resistance In Western Corn Rootworm To Crw-Bt Corn In Midwest Usa, David A. Andow, Robert Wright, Erin W. Hodgson, Thomas E. Hunt, Ken Ostlie

Department of Entomology: Faculty Publications

Resistance in western corn rootworm to transgenic corn hybrids was first confirmed in 2011 in Midwestern USA, and threatens their continued use. Farmers are often the first line of resistance detection, so their understanding and attitudes toward this issue are critical for improving resistance management. We conducted telephone focus groups during 2013 with farmers who had experienced rootworm resistance. There were four stages in dealing with unexpected rootworm injury: Awareness of a problem, diagnosis, confirmation, and recommendations. Most farmers discovered the problem themselves, but this usually happened too late in the growing season to limit yield loss. Once aware of …

Acute-Contact And Chronic-Systemic In Vivo Bioassays: Regional Monitoring Of Susceptibility To Thiamethoxam In Soybean Aphid (Hemiptera: Aphididae) Populations From The North Central United States, Matheus G.P.M. Ribeiro, Thomas E. Hunt, Blair Siegfried

Department of Entomology: Faculty Publications

The risks associated with soybean aphid, Aphis glycines Matsumura (Hemiptera: Aphididae), in the North Central soybean systems has fostered the adoption of prophylactic chemical control practices, such as planting seeds treated with neonicotinoid insecticides, especially thiamethoxam. Consequently, there is a concern that increased selection pressure imposed on the arthropod–pest complex by this insecticide may lead to resistance. Therefore, in vivo bioassays were conducted to determine the susceptibility of soybean aphid to thiamethoxam among North Central U.S. populations. Concentration-mortality data were collected using contact glass-vial and detached-leaf systemic bioassays. The results of these experiments indicate that both bioassays were reliable to …

Identification, Biology, Impacts, And Management Of Stink Bugs (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Pentatomidae) Of Soybean And Corn In The Midwestern United States, Robert L. Koch, Daniela T. Pezzini, Andrew P. Michel, Thomas Hunt

Department of Entomology: Faculty Publications

Stink bugs (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Pentatomidae) are an emerging threat to soybean and corn production in the midwestern United States. An invasive species, the brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomorpha halys (Sta° l), is spreading through the region. However, little is known about the complex of stink bug species associated with corn and soybean in the midwestern United States. In this region, particularly in the more northern states, stink bugs have historically caused only infrequent impacts to these crops. To prepare growers and agricultural professionals to contend with this new threat, we provide a review of stink bugs associated with soybean and …

Evaporation From A Shallow, Saline Lake In The Nebraska Sandhills: Energy Balance Drivers Of Seasonal And Interannual Variability, Diego Andrés Riveros-Iregui, John Lenters, Colin Peake, John T. Ong, Nathan C. Healey, Vitaly A. Zlotnik

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

Despite potential evaporation rates in excess of the local precipitation, dry climates often support saline lakes through groundwater inputs of water and associated solutes. These groundwater-fed lakes are important indicators of environmental change, in part because their shallow water levels and salinity are very sensitive to weather and climatic variability. Some of this sensitivity arises from high rates of open-water evaporation, which is a dominant but poorly quantified process for saline lakes. This study used the Bowen ratio energy budget method to calculate open-water evaporation rates for Alkali Lake, a saline lake in the Nebraska Sandhills region (central United States), …

Negative Binomial Mixed Models For Analyzing Microbiome Count Data, Xinyan Zhang, Himel Mallick, Zaixiang Tang, Lei Zhang, Xiangqin Cui, Andrew K. Benson, Nengjun Yi

Department of Food Science and Technology: Faculty Publications

Background: Recent advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology enable researchers to collect a large volume of metagenomic sequencing data. These data provide valuable resources for investigating interactions between the microbiome and host environmental/clinical factors. In addition to the well-known properties of microbiome count measurements, for example, varied total sequence reads across samples, over-dispersion and zero-inflation, microbiome studies usually collect samples with hierarchical structures, which introduce correlation among the samples and thus further complicate the analysis and interpretation of microbiome count data.

Results: In this article, we propose negative binomial mixed models (NBMMs) for detecting the association between the microbiome and …

Population Structure And Phenotypic Variation Of Sclerotinia Sclerotiorum From Dry Bean (Phaseolus Vulgaris) In The United States, Zhian N. Kamvar, Bimal Sajeewa Amaradasa, Rachana Jhala, Serena Mccoy, James R. Steadman, Sydney Everhart

Department of Plant Pathology: Faculty Publications

The ascomycete pathogen Sclerotinia sclerotiorum is a necrotrophic pathogen on over 400 known host plants, and is the causal agent of white mold on dry bean. Currently, there are no known cultivars of dry bean with complete resistance to white mold. For more than 20 years, bean breeders have been using white mold screening nurseries (wmn) with natural populations of S. sclerotiorum to screen new cultivars for resistance. It is thus important to know if the genetic diversity in populations of S. sclerotiorum within these nurseries (a) reflect the genetic diversity of the populations in the surrounding region and (b) …

Dissecting The Genetic Basis Of Local Adaptation In Soybean, Nonoy B. Bandillo, Justin E. Anderson, Michael B. Kantar, Robert M. Stupar, James E. Specht, George L. Graef, Aaron J. Lorenz

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

Soybean (Glycine max) is the most widely grown oilseed in the world and is an important source of protein for both humans and livestock. Soybean is widely adapted to both temperate and tropical regions, but a changing climate demands a better understanding of adaptation to specific environmental conditions. Here, we explore genetic variation in a collection of 3,012 georeferenced, locally adapted landraces from a broad geographical range to help elucidate the genetic basis of local adaptation. We used geographic origin, environmental data and dense genome-wide SNP data to perform an environmental association analysis and discover loci displaying steep …