Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

2017 Nebraska Water Leaders Academy - Final Report, Mark E. Burbach, H. Reiners-Hild

Conservation and Survey Division: Faculty and Staff Publications

Twenty participants completed the 2017 Water Leaders Academy bringing the total number of graduates to 101 since the inception of the program in 2011. Assessment of participants’ transformational leadership skills, champion of innovation skills, water knowledge and engagement, civic capacity, and entrepreneurial leadership behaviors showed a significant increase over the course of the year, from both participants’ and their raters’ perspectives. Feedback from participants was highly positive and constructive. Participant concerns were addressed, and only minor changes are planned for the 2018 Academy curriculum. Results of the program assessment indicate that the curriculum is meeting Academy objectives. Most importantly, Alumni …

"The Devil Is In The Details:" Inland Northwest Stakeholders’ Views On Three Forest-Based Bioenergy Scenarios, Soren Newman, Darin Saul, Robert Keefe, Ryan Jacobson, Tamara Laninga, Jillian Moroney

University Author Recognition Bibliography: 2017

Public and private initiatives are actively exploring a range of forest-based bioenergy development options in the Inland Northwest of the United States. These efforts are motivated in part by the potential to generate renewable energy while creating a market for forest residues that would facilitate hazardous fuels reduction and provide economic opportunities. Understanding stakeholders’ perspectives is critical to the feasibility and long-term viability of bioenergy projects. This study presents stakeholder perspectives on forest-based bioenergy development strategies for communities in the forested areas of Idaho, western Montana, eastern Washington, and eastern Oregon. We developed three scenarios based on bioenergy initiatives currently …

Mitigating Projected Impacts Of Climate Change And Building Resiliency Through Permaculture: A Community ‘Bee Inspired Gardens’ Movement In The Desert Southwest, Usa, Roslynn Brain, Jeffrey Adams, Jeremy Lynch

Environment and Society Faculty Publications

Permaculture, an integrative design process creating resilient and productive landscapes and communities, can serve as a useful mitigation tool for projected climate change impacts. In the United States, the desert southwest town of Moab, Utah, has employed permaculture design in a community initiative called ‘Bee Inspired Gardens.’ This initiative has harnessed social capital to create resilient landscapes demonstrating pollinator health, water conservation, and perennial food and forage systems. Bee Inspired Gardens have been designed at a University, middle school, charter school, Bureau of Land Management property, hotel, public park, environmental education non-profit, and more. Community members are now harvesting fruit …

Of Rats And Men, Thomas S. Walsh

Capstones

This capstone is a data-driven investigation into New York City's rat problem. By using publicly available government data to map rat activity in NYC, I identified several socio-economic variables that correlate with rat populations at the community district, borough, and city-scale. I used these findings (mainly that rat problems are linked to lower incomes) as the basis of an investigation, which includes interviews with residents, experts, and city officials. Prof. Bobby Corrigan, urban rodentologist and formerly with the NYC Department of Health criticizes the city's efforts for the first time on the record.

https://thomasseiyawalsh.wixsite.com/ratstone

Getting Girls In Stem & The Dangers Of Forgetting That Science Is Art - Someone Made It Up, Heidi Therese Dangelmaier, Camilla Hermann

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Encouraging girls to participate in STEM is a hot topic that has captured the concern of the world’s academic, business and scientific communities. The intention is noble, however the strategies being deployed are reinforcing the very bias society seeks to eliminate. If we wish to advance our evolutionary journey as a species, a shift from “feeling sorry for disadvantaged girls” to “fearing STEM without girls’ reformation” is imperative. This piece discusses the rise to an initiative to redesign culture: Girlapproved.

The Future Of Nuclear Security: A Medical Physicist’S Perspective, Katharine E. Thomson

International Journal of Nuclear Security

Planning for the future of nuclear security is a vital and complex task, requiring cooperation and contribution from many disciplines and industries. This diversity of expertise should include the medical sector, which faces many of the same challenges as the nuclear industry: controlling access to dangerous material, creating a strong security culture, cooperating with the wider world and engaging the public.

Medical physicists, of which the author is one, oversee all aspects of small-scale radiation use. This paper discusses three key areas increasingly important to both medical and nuclear uses of radioactive materials: public engagement, prevention of nuclear and radiological …

The Future Of Nuclear Security In Moroccan Territory After The Creation Of The New Moroccan Agency Of Nuclear And Radiological Safety And Security: Opportunities And Challenges, Amal Touarsi, Amina Kharchaf

International Journal of Nuclear Security

Nowadays, a security regime for protecting nuclear and radiological material—providing an intelligent national regulatory institution and establishing national security laws—is necessary in order for a state to ensure security of nuclear and radiological materials used within its borders.

This paper focuses on discussing the opportunities and challenges facing the future of nuclear security after the creation of the new Moroccan Agency of Nuclear and Radiological Safety and Security.

Assessing And Enhancing Nuclear Safety And Security Culture For Small Facilities That Handle Radioactive Material, Solymosi Máté

International Journal of Nuclear Security

The use of radioactive sources is expanding all over the world and abreast the necessity of the enhancement of its safe and secure application is increasing too. In the nuclear industry, the safety and security are top priorities since decades. They share the same goal, to protect humans from the negative affect of the ionizing radiation. The human component of them is a significant factor and technical solutions can protect us so far and thus the culture for safety and security become a major focus. On the other hand, there are still some contradiction between recommendations and international guidance of …

Breadcrumbs: Privacy As A Privilege, Prachi Bhardwaj

Capstones

Breadcrumbs: Privacy as a Privilege Abstract

By: Prachi Bhardwaj

In 2017, the world saw more data breaches than in any year prior. The count was more than the all-time high record in 2016, which was 40 percent more than the year before that.

That’s because consumer data is incredibly valuable today. In the last three decades, data storage has gone from being stored physically to being stored almost entirely digitally, which means consumer data is more accessible and applicable to business strategies. As a result, companies are gathering data in ways previously unknown to the average consumer, and hackers are …

Hazmat Storage Near Nyc Waterways Endangers Communities, Brett E. Dahlberg, Nicole Acevedo

Capstones

New York City has 520 miles of shoreline--that’s more than Miami and Los Angeles combined. These waterfronts are home to some of the city’s most polluted sites because major part of it is zoned for industrial use. Dozens of industrial plants in this area store toxic chemicals in flood zones: substances that are hazardous to our health, like Benzene, which is used in rocket fuel, toluene, a paint thinner, and lead a neurotoxin. In a flood, these chemicals can easily get caught up in moving waters and pollute entire neighborhoods.

That’s exactly what happened when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. …

Planning Cities, Economically Or Communally: A Comparative Study Of Amsterdam And San Francisco, Raina Dawn Whittekiend

Master's Theses

Globalization has spun “community” off its axis. What once defined community is no longer the current state of the community. Increased economic transactions have led to the instability of communities that once depended on one another at the local level. These communities are now dependent on systems that do not know nor understand their actors. This lack of relationship between development and subject is witnessed and highly scrutinized in developing countries all over the world and has been intensely researched in academic literature. This thesis intends to better understand why in modernized global cities these same processes of development and …

Assessing Preservation Priorities Of Caves And Karst Areas Using The Frequency Of Endemic Cave-Dwelling Species, Eugen Nitzu, Marius Vlaicu, Andrei Giurginca, Ioana N. Meleg, Ionut Popa, Augustin Nae, Ştefan Baba

International Journal of Speleology

Endemic and rare species as bioindicators of habitat vulnerability were used to develop protection and management plans for biotope prioritization (mainly islands habitats, lava tubes or groundwaters). Due to their narrow distribution, the endemic species (species confined to a restricted geographic area) are more susceptible to ecological disequilibrium and habitat loss than the widespread ones. Consequently, endemics become endangered in the context of ecological disturbance caused by anthropogenic pressure, making them suitable candidates to assess environmental preservation needs. Taking into consideration that most of the stygobitic and troglobitic species are endemic and confined to specific karst areas, based on their …

Analysis Of Gender Differences In Authentic Science Inquiry Practices, Arianna Garcia

Ursidae: The Undergraduate Research Journal at the University of Northern Colorado

The purpose of this project is to study differences in male versus female science epistemology as reflected in their practices during authentic science inquiry. Understanding an individual’s science epistemology is important to develop better methods of teaching authentic science inquiry. Science epistemology refers to the beliefs people have about the process of performing scientific inquiry and how scientific information is generated. In particular, students may believe science is a simple process with definite conclusions previously established by professionals, or that science is a complex field with many unanswered questions which require creative and unconventional processes to expose. Scientific inquiry in …

Note From The Editorial Board

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science

No abstract provided.

Movement I From Lamentationes, Timothy W. Mcdunn

CrissCross

This piece is a setting of the first poem in the book of ʼêḵāh from the Hebrew Bible (the book of Lamentations in the Christian Old Testament). Setting the text in its original language has had two primary advantages: (1) it preserved euphony and other poetic subtleties and (2) it left the poetry's original cultural context intact.

I use harmonic rhetoric to imitate several features of the text. One of them is the so-called "tragic reversal," a device illustrated by the lines cited above, where a reversal of fortune is expressed through the contrast between the first colon and the …

Progression Magazine, 2017 Winter, Coastal Carolina University

Progression Magazine

Magazine of the College of Science at Coastal Carolina University.

Approximating The Distribution Of Indefinite Quadratic Forms In Normal Variables By Maximum Entropy Density Estimation, Ghasem Rekabdar, Rahim Chinipardaz

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

The quadratic form of non-central normal variables is presented based on a sum of weighted independent non-central chi-square variables. This presentation provides moments of quadratic form. The maximum entropy method is used to estimate the density function because distribution moments of quadratic forms are known. A Euclidean distance is proposed to select an appropriate maximum entropy density function. In order to compare with other methods some numerical examples were evaluated. Also, for discrimination between two groups by the Euclidean distances, we obtained a stochastic representation for the linear discriminant function using the quadratic form. The maximum entropy estimation was an …

Semi-Parametric Method To Estimate The Time-To-Failure Distribution And Its Percentiles For Simple Linear Degradation Model, Laila Naji Ba Dakhn, Mohammed Al-Haj Ebrahem, Omar Eidous

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Most reliability studies obtained reliability information by using degradation measurements over time, which contains useful data about the product reliability. Parametric methods like the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator and the ordinary least square (OLS) estimator are used widely to estimate the time-to-failure distribution and its percentiles. In this article, we estimate the time-to-failure distribution and its percentiles by using a semi-parametric estimator that assumes the parametric function to have a half- normal distribution or an exponential distribution. The performance of the semi-parametric estimator is compared via simulation study with the ML and OLS estimators by using the mean square error …

Jmasm 48: The Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient And Adjustment Indices: The Fisher Approximate Unbiased Estimator And The Olkin-Pratt Adjustment (Spss), David A. Walker

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

This syntax program is intended to provide an application, not readily available, for users in SPSS who are interested in the Pearson product–moment correlation coefficient (r) and r biased adjustment indices such as the Fisher Approximate Unbiased estimator and the Olkin and Pratt adjustment.

Inferential Procedures For Log Logistic Distribution With Doubly Interval Censored Data, Yue Fang Loh, Jayanthi Arasan, Habshah Midi, M. R. Abu Bakar

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

The log logistic model with doubly interval censored data is examined. Three methods of constructing confidence interval estimates for the parameter of the model were compared and discussed. The results of the coverage probability study indicated that the Wald outperformed the likelihood ratio and jackknife inferential procedures.

On Poisson Quasi-Lindley Distribution And Its Applications, Razika Grine, Halim Zeghdoudi

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

This paper proposes a recent version of compound Poisson distributions named the Poisson quasi-Lindley (PQL) distribution by compounding Poisson and quasi-Lindley distributions. Some properties of the distributions are given with estimation and some illustrative examples.

Detection Of Outliers In Univariate Circular Data Using Robust Circular Distance, Ehab A. Mahmood, Sohel Rana, Habshah Midi, Abdul Ghapor Hussin

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

A robust statistic to detect single and multi-outliers in univariate circular data is proposed. The performance of the proposed statistic was tested by applying it to a simulation study and to three real data sets, and was demonstrated to be robust.

Modeling Agreement Between Binary Classifications Of Multiple Raters In R And Sas, Aya A. Mitani, Kerrie P. Nelson

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Cancer screening and diagnostic tests often are classified using a binary outcome such as diseased or not diseased. Recently large-scale studies have been conducted to assess agreement between many raters. Measures of agreement using the class of generalized linear mixed models were implemented efficiently in four recently introduced R and SAS packages in large-scale agreement studies incorporating binary classifications. Simulation studies were conducted to compare the performance across the packages and apply the agreement methods to two cancer studies.

Jmasm 49: A Compilation Of Some Popular Goodness Of Fit Tests For Normal Distribution: Their Algorithms And Matlab Codes (Matlab), Metin Öner, İpek Deveci Kocakoç

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

The main purpose of this study is to review calculation algorithms for some of the most common non-parametric and omnibus tests for normality, and to provide them as a compiled MATLAB function. All tests are coded to provide p-values for those normality tests, and the proposed function gives the results as an output table.

The Impact Of Predictor Variable(S) With Skewed Cell Probabilities On Wald Tests In Binary Logistic Regression, Arwa Alkhalaf, Bruno D. Zumbo

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

A series of simulation studies are reported that investigated the impact of a skewed predictor(s) on the Type I error rate and power of the Wald test in a logistic regression model. Five simulations were conducted for three different regression models. A detailed description of the impact of skewed cell predictor probabilities and sample size provide guidelines for practitioners wherein to expect the greatest problems.

Jmasm 50: A Web-Based Shiny Application For Conducting A Two Dependent Samples Maximum Test (R), Saverpierre Maggio, Gokul Bhandari, Shlomo S. Sawilowsky

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

A web-based Shiny application written in R statistical language was developed and deployed online to calculate a new two dependent samples maximum test as presented in Maggio and Sawilowsky (2014b). The maximum test allows researchers to conduct both the dependent samples t-test and Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests on same data without raising concerns associated with Type I error inflation and choice of statistical tests (Maggio and Sawilowsky, 2014a). The maximum test in R statistical language provides a friendly user interface.

Jmasm 47: Anova_Hov: A Sas Macro For Testing Homogeneity Of Variance In One-Factor Anova Models (Sas), Isaac Li, Yi-Hsin Chen, Yan Wang, Patricia RodríGuez De Gil, Thanh Pham, Diep Nguyen, Eun Sook Kim, Jeffrey D. Kromrey

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Variance homogeneity (HOV) is a critical assumption for ANOVA whose violation may lead to perturbations in Type I error rates. Minimal consensus exists on selecting an appropriate test. This SAS macro implements 14 different HOV approaches in one-way ANOVA. Examples are given and practical issues discussed.

A Remark For The Admissibility Of Rao’S U-Test, Z. D. Bai, C. R. Rao, M. T. Tsai

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

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Front Matter, Jmasm Editors

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

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Vol. 16, No. 2 (Full Issue), Jmasm Editors

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

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