Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Minerva 2007, The Honors College

Minerva

This issue of Minerva includes an article on the hiring of first-ever full-time Honors faculty members, Mimi Killinger and Mark Haggerty; an article on Honors alumna Molly Barker '00; and a reflection by former Honors Program Director Sam Schuman.

Provenance Tracking In A Commons Of Geographic Data, David B. Mccurry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advancement in digital archiving technologies provides researchers with a multitude of methods for sharing their research and data digitally with others. However, when acquiring data from others directly or indirectly the law often imposes an assumption of copyright in the dataset acquired. This creates a difficult legal situation affecting future use and creation of derivative works from the data. A digital commons may be defined as a shared resource in which creators of contributed materials (data) grant a legal right for all others to use the material under the provisions of an open-access license. This thesis hypothesizes that an approach …

Combining Geospatial And Temporal Ontologies, Kripa Joshi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Publicly available ontologies are growing in number at present. These ontologies describe entities in a domain and the relations among these entities. This thesis describes a method to automatically combine a pair of orthogonal ontologies using cross products. A geospatial ontology and a temporal ontology are combined in this work. Computing the cross product of the geospatial and the temporal ontologies gives a complete set of pairwise combination of terms from the two ontologies. This method offers researchers the benefit of using ontologies that are already existing and available rather than building new ontologies for areas outside their scope of …

Sharing A Landscape: The Construction Of Sense Of Place On The Maine Coast, Andrea Jane Ednie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Motivated by interest and concern over the changing coastline in Maine, this study uses the concept of sense of place to develop an understanding of how a range of users share the resource, and to explore how place meanings are associated with their social experiences and perceptions. The site for this study was the Stonington region archipelago, an area that has not yet experienced the same amount of development as seen on the southern Maine coast, yet one that has witnessed a boom in recreational use and an influx of people from other areas. Using a mixed methodology, two groups …

Council-Manager Charter Of The Town Of Winthrop, Winthrop (Me.). Municipal Officers

Maine Town Documents

No abstract provided.

Biomass And Biofuels In Maine: Estimating Supplies For Expanding The Forest Products Industry, Jonathan Rubin, Kate Dickerson, Jacob Kavkewitz

Energy & the Environment

This paper estimates the renewable energy potential of Maine’s forest resources, and how much energy these resources could potentially provide the state. Using the most recent state-specific data available, and a methodology similar to the Billion Tons Report, we find that ethanol production from Maine’s forest residues could potentially provide 18% of Maine’s transportation (gasoline) fuels with a fermentation wood to ethanol process. Making Fischer-Tropsch diesel (F-T diesel) using forest residues can replace 39% of Maine’s petro-diesel consumption. Actual levels of biofuels that can be produced will depend on conversion factors and forestry residue removals that are subject to uncertainty.

Pine Tree Notes (November-December 2007), General Federation Of Women's Clubs - Maine Chapter Staff

Maine Women's Publications - All

No abstract provided.

Silverwire Newsletter, Lenard W. Kaye

Maine Center on Aging Education and Training

The Silverwire Newsletter is a triannual publication that highlights the work of the UMaine Center on Aging. The topics covered in this edition of the Silverwire Newsletter include the EPA grant to implement a prescription drug return program, The Center on Aging prescription drug conference, and the Center on Aging's volunteer work throughout the Bangor community.

Silverwire, University Of Maine Center On Aging

Maine Center on Aging Education and Training

The Silverwire Newsletter is a publication that highlights the work of the UMaine Center on Aging. The topics covered in this edition of the Silverwire Newsletter include the EPA Grant for Pilot Drug-Return Program, the relocation of administrative positions, quality assurance review to be conducted for Adult Protective Services, the Geriatric Mental Health Curriculum Project, trainings of the RSVP Station, issues of retirement preparedness, the Prescription Drug Conference, and a master’s level course in clinical practice being offered.

Mr443: Maine Coastal Islands Visitor Survey 2006--Deer Isle/Stonington Region, Andres J. Ednie, John J. Daigle

Miscellaneous Reports

This research was designed to help the Maine Island Trail Association and others interested in the management of the Maine’s coastal islands. This report presents results from an island-monitoring program in which we inventoried social conditions on a subset of the public islands on the Maine Island Trail. This research was designed to build on the ecological inventory developed by the task force and to help MITA and other groups to manage the islands by determining characteristics of the Maine island visit, including activities, use patterns, method of travel, length of stay; determining characteristics of the visitors, including types of …

New Hope For Women Newsletter (Fall 2007), New Hope For Women Staff

Maine Women's Publications - All

No abstract provided.

Pine Tree Notes (Septemer-October 2007), General Federation Of Women's Clubs - Maine Chapter Staff

Maine Women's Publications - All

No abstract provided.

Mr442: Business Climate For Maine's Environmental And Energy Technology Sector, Caroline L. Noblet, Todd M. Gabe

Miscellaneous Reports

This report presents findings from a survey that concentrated on issues pertaining to Maine’s business climate for the environmental and energy technology sector. The Environmental and Energy Technology (E2Tech) Council of Maine commissioned the survey, with support from the Maine Technology Institute’s Cluster Enhancement Award. The survey, conducted during the summer of 2006, collected information on the factors believed to affect the business climate for Maine’s environmental and energy technology sector, including availability of external investment, skilled workforce, collaboration among firms and in-state partners. Information on state characteristics (e.g., taxes, state/local government support, location relative to key inputs) that may …

Assessing The Sustainability Of Agricultural Systems, Laura L. Kramar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work constructs and tests a comparative technique that can be used to determine the ability of agricultural systems to meet multiple objectives of sustainability. Assessments are based on an agricultural system's ability to maintain five system stocks that represent environmental capital, social capital, human capital, physical capital, and financial capital. The capital stocks are measured as stock objectives, which are decomposed as indicators to calculate agricultural system scores. An examination of the complexity of agro-ecosystems and the multiple equilibria produced by balancing multiple objectives is used to explain the alternative criteria used in this comparative technique to evaluate agricultural …

Exercise And Mood: Exploring The Role Of Exercise In Regulating Stress Reactivity In Bipolar Disorder, Teresa M. Edenfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bipolar Disorder (BD) is a recurrent and debilitating psychological disorder characterized by a chronic dysregulation of mood with fluctuations between extremely low (e.g., depression) and extremely elevated mood states (e.g., mania), and ranks as the 6th leading cause of disability in the world. Although research has consistently shown that exercise may have antidepressant and stress-attenuating benefits in other psychiatric illnesses (e.g., depression, anxiety), these benefits have not been directly investigated for BD. The current study represents the first known investigation to examine this relationship. Single-participant designs, with crossover and interaction treatment components (i.e., A/B/A/B/A, A/C/A/C/A, A/B/A/C/A, or A/C/A/B/A) were utilized …

Maine Drug-Induced Deaths: A Brief White Paper Prepared For The Spf-Sig State Epidemiology Workgroup, August, 2007, Marcella H. Sorg

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

Drug death statistics for Cumberland County declined following an effort at public health information targeted at users/misusers. Specific education messages aimed at young adults, particularly males and 20-34 year olds will potentially reach the most at risk group. Messages regarding the dangers of diversion, recognition of snoring as a warning sign of respiratory distress, the benefits of placing users in the “recovery position to maximize airway access are being used in Cumberland and Kennebec Counties.

Education efforts targeted at health care providers who write narcotic prescriptions and the patients who receive them should be supported, particularly encouraging messages about the …

Impact Of New Science And Engineering Graduates On Intrastate Labor Markets, Philip A. Trostel

University of Maine Office of Research Administration: Grant Reports

A major policy issue confronting states is the level of state support to higher education. A crucial question in this policy debate is whether a state's production of college graduates has a proportionate effect on the level of college attainment in the state. Although it is widely accepted that rising college attainment leads to rising prosperity, there is widespread concern that many new college graduates will take their state-supported degrees to labor markets in other states. The belief that state support to higher education subsidizes the workforce development of other states undermines states' incentives to promote wider access to higher …

Elder Abuse Screening Protocol For Physicians: Lessons Learned From The Maine Partners For Elder Protection Pilot Project, University Of Maine Center On Aging

Maine Center on Aging Research and Evaluation

This manual was designed to assist physicians, nurses, and medical office managers become aware on means to incorporate screening processes in regard to elder abuse. The United States Senate Special Committee on Aging has reported that as many as five million elderly persons are abuses each year in the United States. By implementing proper screening procedures, disclosure will be made easier, thus protecting patients from harm. The screening procedure involves evaluating for mistreatment among patients 60 years or older, at least once per year. The protocol has been tested in 16 healthcare facilities with a total of 2,082 patients being …

Touching Is Good: An Eidetic Phenomenology Of Interface, Interobjectivity, And Interaction In Nintendo's "Animal Crossing: Wild World", Bryan G. Behrenshausen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Situating video games and the meaningful practice of playing video games for future study by the discipline of communication, this eidetic phenomenology centers the focus of such inquiry at the site of the body. As video game studies have heretofore largely ignored or presupposed a bifurcation between player and video game, a phenomenology is likewise crucial to investigating the lived experience of video gaming as an embodied activity by theoretically eschewing such subject/object distinctions and methodologically generating genuinely new, heuristic spaces for thinking about this phenomenon. In particular, the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which emphasizes the body as necessarily …

Semantic Interoperability Of Geospatial Ontologies: A Model-Theoretic Analysis, James A. Farrugia

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

People sometimes misunderstand each other, even when they use the same language to communicate. Often these misunderstandings happen when people use the same words to mean different things, in effect disagreeing about meanings. This thesis investigates such disagreements about meaning, considering them to be issues of semantic interoperability. This thesis explores semantic interoperability via a particular formal framework used to specify people’s conceptualizations of a given domain. This framework is called an ‘ontology,’ which is a collection of data and axioms written in a logical language equipped with a modeltheoretic semantics. The domain under consideration is the geospatial domain. Specifically, …

Peruvian Beach Ridges: Records Of Human Activity And Climate Change, David A. Reid

Honors College

Among the many unusual features of the desert coast of northern Peru are the five major beach-ridge sets: Santa (9˚S), Piura (5˚30' S), Colán (5˚S), Chira (4˚50' S), and Tumbes (3˚40’ S). These features of the landscape began forming after 5800 cal yr B.P., initiated by severe El Niño and seismic events. Archaeological remains on the beach-ridge sets of Santa, Colán, and Chira provide evidence of local prehistoric peoples. The extent of prehistoric occupation and utilization of beach ridges varied due to environmental limitations influenced by beach-ridge substrate material, local paleoenvironments, and climate-change events.

Story Medicine: The Power Of Healing A Journey From Anger To Inner Peace, Tifanny Ann Warzecha

Honors College

No abstract provided.

South End Neighborhood Strategic Plan, Waterville (Me.). City Officials

Maine Town Documents - Waterville

The South End Neighborhood Strategic Plan is a guide and expression of the neighborhood's vision. The plan is a guide for managing change within the neighborhood for the next 20 years. The plan establishes a blueprint for change with in the neighborhood. It accomplishes this by setting goals and objectives to be met in future years. Some of the objectives are broad and others are very specific. A responsible party is assigned to each objective along with a projected cost and a target date for completion.

Silverwire Newsletter, Lenard W. Kaye

Maine Center on Aging Education and Training

The Silverwire Newsletter is a triannual publication that highlights the work of the UMaine Center on Aging. The topics covered in this edition of the Silverwire Newsletter include the 'Senior $ense' program and a rural perspective on grandparents raising grandchildren.

Profile Effects In Early Bilingual Language And Literacy, D. Kimbrough Oller, Alan Cobo-Lewis, Barbara Z. Pearson

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Bilingual children's language and literacy is stronger in some domains than others. Reanalysis of data from a broad-scale study of monolingual English and bilingual Spanish-English learners in Miami provided a clear demonstration of "profile effects," where bilingual children perform at varying levels compared to monolinguals across different test types. The profile effects were strong and consistent across conditions of socioeconomic status, language in the home, and school setting (two way or English immersion). The profile effects indicated comparable performance of bilingual and monolingual children in basic reading tasks, but lower vocabulary scores for the bilinguals in both languages. Other test …

Pine Tree Notes (March-April 2007), General Federation Of Women's Clubs - Maine Chapter Staff

Maine Women's Publications - All

No abstract provided.

Emotions, Not Just Decision-Making Processes, Are Critical To An Evolutionary Model Of Human Behavior, Glenn E. Weisfeld, Peter J. Lafreniere

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

An evolutionary model of human behavior should privilege emotions: essential, phylogenetically ancient behaviors that learning and decision making only subserve. Infants and non-mammals lack advanced cognitive powers but still survive. Decision making is only a means to emotional ends, which organize and prioritize behavior. The emotion of pride/shame, or dominance striving, bridges the social and biological sciences via internalization of cultural norms.

Recognizing And Preventing Hazards In The Construction Industry, Bureau Of Labor Education. University Of Maine

Bureau of Labor Education

By the nature of the work, the construction industry is very hazardous and dangerous. These dangers are multiplied still further when workers and supervisors employed in this industry are working at manufacturing sites such as pulp and paper mills. This handbook deals with the following hazards confronting workers and employers in construction, which have been identified by OSHA as priority areas for hazard recognition and prevention: • fall hazards on the same level or from a higher to a lower one; • being struck by or against any hazardous materials, equipment, or vehicles; • getting caught on, caught in, or …

Stretching The Law, Stressing The State Misclassified Workers In Maine's Construction Industry, Bureau Of Labor Education. University Of Maine

Bureau of Labor Education

The classification of independent contractors (ICs) is problematic in a number of industries and employment situations. This paper is intended as a survey of IC issues as they affect the construction industry in Maine. Construction companies have recourse to hourly labor for much of their work requirements, but like many other businesses, they also often employ independent contractors for some parts of their various building contracts. There is considerable evidence that these two job categories are being manipulated by some employers to bypass the legal intent of IC classification. A 2000 report produced for the U.S. Department of Labor found …

Research Note: Searching For Democracy In Colonial Southern Maine, William Robbins

Maine History

The following article was originally written as a seminar paper for James Henderson’s colonial history class during Robbins’s brief tenure as a graduate student at the University of Maine. The methodology used in this research was quite innovative when it was written in 1966, as the so-called new social history had only just emerged. This era marked an exciting time in the social sciences, with new methods that allowed the historian to approach history “from the bottom up.” Using census records, land records, tax lists, suffrage lists, and an array of other data, historians were able to uncover what life …