Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Part 4: The Virginia Symphony Orchestra: The Valiant Struggles Of A Cultural Jewel, Regional Studies Institute, Old Dominion University

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

The Virginia Symphony Orchestra (VSO) ranks well when compared to orchestras in regions of similar size and wealth, and in maestro JoAnn Falletta boasts a distinguished musical director. However, the symphony has accumulated a debt of approximately $2 million. Determined fund raising may reduce this debt, but the VSO’s ultimate challenge is to attract a larger and more diverse clientele. If it does not, it could join a half dozen other regional orchestras throughout the country that recently have been forced to contract significantly or even declare bankruptcy.

Part 6: The Role And Influence Of African American Legislators From Hampton Roads, Regional Studies Institute, Old Dominion University

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

African Americans comprise more than three of every 10 residents of Hampton Roads. Only recently, however, has this population translated into a large number of elected representatives in the Virginia General Assembly. This year, there are eight elected African American legislators in Richmond who claim Hampton Roads as their home. We explore their power and influence, noting that many do not yet possess the seniority to wield extensive influence. All eight legislators are Democrats and serve in a statehouse dominated by Republicans.

Part 5: Electricity Deregulation: What Impact Will It Have On Hampton Roads?, Regional Studies Institute, Old Dominion University

State of the Region Reports: Hampton Roads

The Virginia General Assembly has voted to deregulate electricity in Virginia, but has delayed critical parts of this process until 2010 at the earliest. Recently, the General Assembly seems to have lost some of its stomach for deregulation. Nationally, deregulation usually is associated with lower electricity prices; however, there are notable exceptions. Virginia’s electricity prices currently are not high by national standards.

Including Organizational Cultural Parameters In Work Processes, Holly A. H. Handley, Nancy J. Heacox

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Recent work in modeling decision-making work processes has focused on including the national culture of individual decision-makers in order to emphasize the differences in decision criteria between decision-makers of different nationalities. In addition to nationality, a decision-maker is also a member of an organization and brings this organizational culture to his role in the work process, where it may also affect his task performance. In order to represent the organizational impact on the work process, five organizational cultural parameters were identified and included in an algorithm for modeling and simulation of cultural difference in human decision-making. While the five modifiers …

The Effects Of Operator Trust, Complacency Potential, And Task Complexity On Monitoring A Highly Reliable Automated System, Nathan R. Bailey

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Technological advances have allowed for widespread implementation of automation in complex systems. However, the increase in quantity and complexity of advanced automated systems has raised a number of potential concerns including degraded monitoring skills. The present investigation consisted of two studies that assessed the impact of system reliability, complacency potential, monitoring complexity, operator trust, and system experience on monitoring performance. In both studies, participants monitored a simulated aviation display for failures while operating a manually controlled flight task. In addition, the second experiment assessed the ability of operators to detect a single automation failure over three experimental sessions. Results indicated …

The Psychological Contract Of Multiple Agency Relationships: Understanding The Attitudes And Behaviors Of Contractors, Cynthia J. Maahs

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Previous research offers inconsistent findings with respect to attitude and behavior differences for contingent and permanent workers. The current study proposes the psychological contract as an explanatory framework for understanding differences between contractors and regular employees. The hypotheses examined attitudinal and behavioral measures: organizational commitment, job satisfaction, intent to quit, job performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors. The two components of the psychological contract (relational vs. transactional) were thought to impact differentially the outcome measures. Approximately 650 employees in a technology contracting organization completed an on-line survey designed to test the hypotheses. The two-factor structure of psychological contract was confirmed and …

Creating Individual Behavior Change Through 360-Degree Feedback: A Development Pipeline Perspective, Victoria Cole Stage

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Ensuring that individuals develop new and more productive behaviors on the job is a challenge for many organizations and a focus of time, effort, and energy spent on programs to facilitate this change. This research was an effort to validate and utilize a framework for understanding how efforts toward individual development are restricted. To do this, I used a new 360-degree feedback instrument called “Time 2 Change” that measures self, manager, direct report, and peer/colleague perceptions of change in the individual. This instrument also measures the individual's perceptions of development enablers, in a framework called a Development Pipeline. As a …

Comparisons Among Parent Reports And Self-Reports Of Sleep In Adhd And Normal School-Aged Children, Diana M. Turner-Eadie

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The objective of the study was to investigate whether school-aged children diagnosed with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) experience greater sleep disturbance than do normally-developing children. Participants included 33 parents and their children with ADHD (mean age = 10.7 ± 1.7 years) and 33 parents and their children without ADHD (mean age = 10.7 ± 1.6 years). Both parents and their children completed sleep questionnaires developed to assess a number of sleep variables. Based on parental report, the Total Sleep Disturbance score was significantly greater for the ADHD group than for the comparison group. Parents indicated that children with ADHD had …

The Relationship Among Disclosure, Internalized Homophobia, Religiosity, And Psychological Well-Being In A Lesbian Population, Sharon Lyn Clayman

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

This study investigated the relationship among disclosure, internalized homophobia, and religiosity in a lesbian population and how these three variables are related to psychological well-being in order to build upon the scant amount of empirical research on these variables in the lesbian psychological literature. A total of 679 women, 18 to 70 years old, and from all across the country were recruited via the internet to participate in a web-based survey. Participants completed a demographic questionnaire, the Lesbian Internalized Homophobia Scale (Szymanski & Chung, 2001), the Outness Inventory (Mohr & Fassinger, 2000), the Behavioral Self-Disclosure Questionnaire (Carroll & Gilroy, 2000), …

Johann August Weppen's Der Hessische Officer In Amerika And David Christoph Seybold's Reizenstein: The American Revolution And The German Bürgertum's Reassessment Of America, Virginia Sasser Delacey

Institute for the Humanities Theses

While American, British, and French reactions to the American Revolution are well-known, those of the German people are not, despite the presence of almost 30,000 German soldiers in America fighting for the British army and hundreds of German volunteers fighting for the American patriots. The participation of German soldiers on both sides of the conflict inspired numerous works of German poetry, prose, and drama, all largely forgotten in the wake of the French Revolution and the rise of German Classicism and Romanticism. This thesis examines two works that have received brief mention in the past two centuries: Der hessische Officier …

On Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports In American Film And Stephen C. Wood And J. David Pincus's Reel Baseball: Essays And Interviews On The National Pastime, Hollywood And American Culture, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film is an indictment of the key American myth that anyone can succeed through self-reliance. Baker finds that sports films, in general, comprise a site in which the myth is represented and reproduced. Baker's focus, though presented from multiple analytical perspectives, is singular in its purpose. That said, Baker does concentrate on what he considers the four core American sports: football, baseball, basketball and boxing. Approximately ninety movies, from the silent era to the present day, provide the content of the analysis, but several are exemplary and are cited repeatedly in …

Reconstructing The Fables: Women On The Educational Cyberfrontier, Jim Dwight

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Computer technology and the Internet inspire narratives based upon modernist tropes. The frontier narrative stands out as one of the most intriguing tropes. Often the language for the Internet regulation and administration of computers, particularly in education, plays on tropes of the Wild, Wild West. Sojourners brave the untamed expanses of cyberspace laying claim to virgin territories. Often, writers represent the frontier as a pure form of woman, the object of masculine desires for conquest such as Natty Bumppo's symbolic marriage to the disappearing frontier in James Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1981 [1826]), Odysseus' conquest of …

Of Technology And Apocalypse, Or Whose Independence Day?, Christopher Keep

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The scene is now familiar. The cities of the world are in ruins. The Empire State Building obliterated. The White House reduced to rubble. The remnants of humankind gather in the desert, scrounging together what remains of their air defence systems for one last effort to repulse the alien invaders. Haggard but determined, the last American President prepares to lead his motley crew of resistance fighters into the fray. He takes the hand mic, tests it once or twice, and his voice crackles over the speakers. In less than one hour, he announces, aircraft from here will join …

On Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Andrew Miles Jacobsen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

No book since American Psycho has created as much of a scandal. And few books have been as misunderstood. In 1990, months before it was set to be released, certain violent passages were leaked to the press that, taken out of context, made the book seem like a depth-less celebration of sexual violence. Right after Simon & Schuster canceled the book, an employee of the publishing house said, The most unfortunate thing about this whole controversy is that the book is a piece of shit. It's hard when something like this becomes an issue of censorship, because you …

Satellite Evidence Of Hurricane-Induced Phytoplankton Blooms In An Oceanic Desert, S. M. Babin, J. A. Carton, T. D. Dickey, J. D. Wiggert

CCPO Publications

The physical effects of hurricanes include deepening of the mixed layer and decreasing of the sea surface temperature in response to entrainment, curl-induced upwelling, and increased upper ocean cooling. However, the biological effects of hurricanes remain relatively unexplored. In this paper, we examine the passages of 13 hurricanes through the Sargasso Sea region of the North Atlantic during the years 1998 through 2001. Remotely sensed ocean color shows increased concentrations of surface chlorophyll within the cool wakes of the hurricanes, apparently in response to the injection of nutrients and/or biogenic pigments into the oligotrophic surface waters. This increase in post-storm …

Endless Enlightenment: Eye-Operated Technology And The Political Economy Of Vision, Michael Gardiner

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Despite a residual popular temptation to see the posts of cultural analysis as signs of temporal closure, the logic of global visual media is strengthening, not weakening, metaphors of visibility which remain intact from the Enlightenment. Here I describe a stand-off between post-Enlightenment critiques (as in some sectors of Cultural Studies) and a narrow power base which is defined by producing light and managing the very conditions of visibility. For the world's most powerful state, still strongly bound to its original Enlightenment foundations, intervention into other states' sovereignty is increasingly justified by evidence from spy planes (rather than …

Neighborhood Characteristics And Crime: A Test Of Sampson And Groves' Model Of Social Disorganization, Ivan Y. Sun, Ruth A. Triplett, Randy R. Gainey

Sociology & Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

In 1989 Sampson and Groves proposed a model of social disorganization. In this model, neighborhoods with low socioeconomic status, high residential mobility, racial heterogeneity, and family disruption were predicted to have sparse local friendship networks', low organizational participation, and unsupervised youth groups. These, in turn, were predicted to increase neighborhood crime rates. Although Sampson and Groves' work represents the most complete model of social disorganization to date, it has only been tested twice and then on the same data set. Using data from 36 neighborhoods from 7 U.S. cities, this study examines extensions of Sampson and Groves' model suggested by …

Lesbian Jokes: A Reply To Christie Davies, Janet Bing

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Contesting Identities: Sports In American Film [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film is an indictment of the key American myth that anyone can succeed through self-reliance. Baker finds that sports films, in general, comprise a site in which the myth is represented and reproduced. Baker's focus, though presented from multiple analytical perspectives, is singular in its purpose. That said, Baker does concentrate on what he considers the four core American sports: football, baseball, basketball and boxing. Approximately ninety movies, from the silent era to the present day, provide the content of the analysis, but several are exemplary and are cited repeatedly in the book's …

Reel Baseball: Essays And Interviews On The National Pastime, Hollywood And American Culture, Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

The editors of Reel Baseball begin by acknowledging the roots of their collection, which explores the intersection between movies and baseball. Since 1989 the National Baseball Hall of Fame has hosted the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. Since 1997, McFarland has published all papers presented at the symposium. Reel Baseball, then, functions both as a document and as an artifact of the "integral" place of baseball movies in American culture. Indeed, the book not only includes essays presented at the symposium, it has two foreword sections: one written by Hall of Fame President Dale Petroskey and the …

"Two Guns, A Girl And A Playstation™": Gender In The Tomb Raider Series, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This article considers the combination of game play and narrative which combine to produce cross-gender identifications in video games, a previously underexamined potential for the production of alternate genders, one which calls into question the stability of gender, particularly masculinity, as a construct.

A Review Of Cyberactivism: Online Activism In Theory And Practice, Kevin Eric De Pew

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

New And Now: A Plea For Historiography And Technology, Haidee Wasson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, the word new was persistently attached to the term technology, a coupling intended to reference a vast range of phenomena -- computers, the internet, wireless telecommunications, satellite cinema and so on. Throughout this period, these technologies were widely heralded as global panaceas. In the pages of glossy hi-tech magazines and academic annals alike, the obliteration of racism, homophobia, sexism, and the great class divide became subjunctive to the problem of connecting everybody everywhere to emergent digital networks. Decentering old-world imperial powers and creating alternative cultural formations became battle cries for the new …

Review Of G4m3rs, By Kiyash Monsef, Bryan-Mitchell Young

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Reading Over The Shoulder Of The Future At The Library Of Congress, Samuel Gerald Collins

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

It is 2003 and I am doing some research at the Library of Congress, the de facto national library for the United States and the largest library in the world. Next to me sit some articles I've printed off of online journals on the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's Total Information Awareness Project, a plan, still in its formative stage, to throw a panopticon net of surveillance across the United States through a combination of language translation technologies, data search and pattern recognition technologies, and advanced collaborative and decision support tools (DARPA). But I am also doing research …

Review Of Free Schools, Free People: Education And Democracy After The 1960s, By Ron Miller, Kathleen Mcconnell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Crisp And Fuzzy Signal Detection Theory And Pilot Weather Judgment: Implications For Vfr Flights Into Imc, Joseph T. Coyne

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Weather represents one of the greatest hazards to general aviation (GA), accounting for 15% of the GA accident fatalities. Of the fatal weather accidents 90% are attributed to visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC). The situation assessment hypothesis suggests that pilots may inadvertently enter IMC because they lack the sensitivity needed to distinguish between visual meteorological conditions (VMC) and IMC. An alternative hypothesis is that pilots recognize conditions have deteriorated but are motivated by some other factor, such as pressure from passengers. The present study uses Jensen's Pilot Judgment Model and Signal Detection Theory to explain …

Compellence: An Empirical Perspective, Michael G. Dziubinski

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Compellence, the use of a contingent threat of force to get a target state to modify a behavior, is an understudied area of international relations. An empirical examination of this area reveals patterns of the frequency of attempted compellence and successful compellence that are not explained by current research or broader international relations theories. In the post-World War II period (1946–2001), the pattern is a rapid drop and continued suppression of success, but a continuation of compellence attempts at the historic level. Existing compellence research and international relations theory do not explain this puzzling disparity of low success and continued …

Aircraft Picture Postcards As A Tool For Influence Through Images, Daniel Martel

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The era in which we live at the turn of the millennium is defined by most scholars -- depending on their specialisation -- as the era of worldwide economic integration, adoption of technologies of western origins, internal harmonization of institutions and working procedures, and cultural standardization. The roots of this can be traced back to the Renaissance, as well as the industrial revolutions and economic liberalism. Their driving forces are successful economic transactions and permanent innovation. According to this worldview, the ultimate goal of any such activity is the optimised individual situation of any human being or economic …

"Sturdy Black Bridges": Discussing Race, Class, And Gender, Kaavonia Hinton

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

Black feminist literary theory offers tools that teachers can use to initiate discussions on the issues of race, gender and class to analyze the works of adolescent literature. This feminist theory helps in reading and teaching literature about parallel cultures, like African-Americans and their love for self and community and their recognition of multiple oppressions in a way that differs from feminism.