Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Wheat Profits Reach Ten Year High, Paul Burgener

Cornhusker Economics

With concerns about increasing costs on the minds of wheat farmers, it is time to look back at the past ten years to evaluate wheat production profitability. To maintain consistency over the past ten years, two systems (pivot irrigated and clean till dryland wheat fallow) were compared across the past four University of Nebraska Crop Budgets (1999, 2001, 2004 and 2006), and a 2008 update completed for Nebraska Panhandle crops.

For the irrigated production, a yield goal of 80 bushels per acre is used to determine the cost structure and to compute the potential returns for each year. The dryland …

China Beat Contributors Around The Web

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. Jeff Wasserstrom was recently interviewed about the Shanghai NIMBY protests for a Danish newspaper.

2. For visitors heading to the Olympics, Wasserstrom also recently published a few suggestions at Outlook India for a Beijing itinerary for “culturally-minded tourists.”

3. Contributor Richard Kraus was referenced recently in a New Yorker article on the classical music scene in China.

4. Pankaj Mishra (oft-referenced in these pages) published a short piece a few weeks ago in The Guardian on inter-war travel writing. Mishra mentions off-hand that, in contrast to the quickly seen and sketched travel writing of the 1930s, “the best non-fiction …

Susan Brownell Around The World

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

China Beat contributor Susan Brownell is showing up all over the web these days, as her special knowledge on Olympic and Chinese sports history is in high demand. Here is a list of some of her recent media appearances:

1. On PRI’s “The World,” Brownell talks about some of the differences between Western and Chinese notions of body and sports; the report also includes a short excerpt from Jonathan Spence’s Reith Lecture “The Body Beautiful,” which Xu Guoqi blogged about at China Beat earlier this month.

2. Brownell has also been cited in several NPR reports, including these two by …

Securing The Olympics, Eric Setzekorn

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

More than any state-of-the-art sports complex or amazing athletic performance, many visitors will remember the Beijing Olympics as the world’s largest security event. In an effort to squelch any sort of protest or more serious terrorist act the government has instituted strict new rules and enforced many existing but hitherto disregarded laws. Estimates of total security personnel range from 250,000 to 500,000, depending on the criteria, but visitors should be either alarmed or comforted to know their every action is monitored and scrutinized.

The epicenter for Olympic security is Tiananmen Square. Since 1989 and even more so since the Falun …

A Defense Of Jiang Rong’S Wolf Totem, Timothy Weston

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I have a confession to make: I was moved by Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, think it’s an important novel and that it’s well worth reading. The reason I say I feel a need to “confess” as opposed to just being able to state this is because recent postingson The China Beat, as well as some of the reviews referenced in those postings, attack the book with a sharpness and thoroughgoingness that initially made me question my own taste and to think that I was politically incorrect for liking and being impressed by the novel as I read it. But after …

What We’Re Reading Today

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There are a few themes we’ve been tracking lately at China Beat, including growing Chinese nationalism, middle class protest, and India-China comparisons. Here are a few stories we’ve noticed around the web this week that address some of these issues:

1. For a thoughtful take on the fenqing phenomenon, check out Evan Osnos’s recent New Yorker piece, “Angry Youth: The New Generation’s Neocon Nationalists.”

2. Financial Times ran a recent piece on the efforts to stop construction of a nuclear power station in Rushan (southeast of Beijing)–see “China Pressure Groups Learn to Tread Carefully.”

3. Earlier this week, Danwei.org ran …

Rocking Beijing, Eric Setzekorn

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Like almost every aspect of Beijing life in the past five years, the live music scene has undergone rapid but uneven development. Beijing has always prided itself on the gritty originality of its live music compared to the dominance of cover bands in Shanghai or the saccharine Canto-pop of Hong Kong. The recent opening of new, modern venues on both sides of the city has allowed dozens of new bands and a newly affluent urban youth to establish a flourishing but still shallow live music scene.

For live music, particularly rock and hip hop music, the Olympics are bringing challenges …

Co-Product Store: An Economic Budget For Determining Co-Product Storage Costs, Josie Waterbury, Darrell R. Mark

Cornhusker Economics

In the last few years the decrease in co-product price, particularly that of wet distillers grains plus solubles (WDGS) during the late summer months, has provided incentive for producers to purchase co-products during this period. This provided producers the opportunity to store the co-product and feed it at a later date. Although current co-product prices are not mirroring the “typical” ethanol co-product seasonal price trend (Waterbury and Mark, 2008) that has been evident in the past (Figure 1 on next page), storage opportunities still exist for cattle feeders and cow/calf operations. From an economic perspective, ethanol co-products continue to be …

Beijing’S New Flame, Rob Gifford

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The essence of Beijing has always been found in its buildings. The city has no major river, no coastline. There are some hills to the west and the north, with the Great Wall stretched across them, but there is none of the geographic razzle-dazzle that created towns like Hong Kong or San Francisco or Sydney or Istanbul. As the historian Arnold Toynbee noted when he visited in the 1930s, Beijing as a city owes little to nature and everything to art.

The art of which Toynbee wrote was contained within the ancient walls of the Forbidden City, where the emperor …

Faq #6: Are The Beijing Olympic Games Being Used As A Propaganda Campaign To Prop Up The Communist Party?

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

“Olympic education” is the IOC’s label for the educational efforts that are supposed to be an integral part of the Olympic Movement as required by Fundamental Principle #1 of the Olympic Charter, which states that Olympism is a philosophy of life that blends sport with culture and education. Since 2005 Chinahas been carrying out the largest-scale “Olympic education” campaign in history.There have been academic and professional conferences, textbooks and courses for public schools and universities, educational television and radio shows, magazine and newspaper essays, websites, and more.

In fall of 2007 I was added to the “experts team” of Beijing …

China Around The World: Australia, Rowan Callick

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

It’s hard for me to compare how Australians and others cover China, in part because we rarely actually meet each other to swap notes, except for the occasional encounter via the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (an admirable organization, but one without formal standing in China because it lacks—for obvious reasons on both sides—the sponsorship of a party or government body) and in part because the whole structure of journalism in China does not bring reporters together frequently, as it does in most other countries.

I sometimes go for weeks without encountering another journalist. For China has few press conferences, …

Duelling Dreams At The 2008 Beijing Olympics, James Leibold

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This year is China’s year. On the 8th day of the 8th month at 8pm, it will light the flame of the 29th Olympics Games—bringing not only the world’s athletes to Beijing but also thousands of foreign visitors and millions more through the massive global media contingency that will descend on the capital.

What will the media spotlight capture? The luster of an ancient civilization and emerging superpower as many in China hope; or the darker, seedier corners of an authoritarian yet fragile party-state as many in the West suspect.

According to the Chinese government, the Olympics games have never …

Adjusting American Indian Treaties: A Guide To Supplemental Article And Supplementary Treaty Citations From Opinions Of The Federal, State, And Territorial Court Systems, Charles D. Bernholz

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

Supplemental articles and supplementary treaties were used as tools to modify American Indian treaties. In general, supplemental articles were adjustments to the parameters of a treaty, frequently made as quickly as the same – or the next – day of negotiations, whereas the task of a supplementary treaty was to affect the conditions created in a previous treaty(s).

As the law of the land, these materials have been referenced in the opinions of the federal, state, and territorial court systems. This article identifies those 80 documents – a combination of 39 initial treaties and their 41 supplements – cited in …

Kung Fu Panda, Go Home!, Haiyan Lee

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

It seems that boycott fatigue has finally hit the Chinese, in a year that has lurched from one boycott to another—against such entities as a French supermarket chain, a Hollywood star, and an American cable channel. When the latest clarion call was issued by a performance artist named Zhao Bandi赵半狄 against Kung Fu Panda, he was greeted with jeers and mockery. Zhao presented his case in a blog: Hollywood is morally corrupt for churning out loathsome personalities like Sharon Stone (who betrayed schadenfreude over the Sichuan earthquake as “karmic retribution” for Tibet) and Steven Spielberg (who quit his role as …

Things We’D Rather You Not Say On The Web, Or Anywhere Else, David Bandurski

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I love words. And I thank you in advance, dear citizens, for obeying mine. Words are dangerous and slippery things. Some people in the West will tell you that words are playthings, and that we should all be free to do with them as we please. But I want to tell you that words are really all we have – and this is why the Party has troubled itself to choose them so carefully on your behalf.

You will have heard, I suppose, that Article 35 of our nation’s constitution guarantees that you enjoy “freedom of expression.” You will no …

From Lovers To Volunteers: Tian Han And The National Anthem, Liang Luo

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

As the clock counts down towards the opening of the Olympic Games at 8 p.m. on August 8, 2008, the Chinese government and many ordinary Chinese citizens are hoping that one particular song will make an impression on television viewers in all corners of the globe: “March of the Volunteers,” the country’s National Anthem. Not only will it play during the Opening Ceremony and the Closing Ceremony, but also every time a Chinese athlete wins a gold medal, and expectations are running high that this will happen a lot, thanks largely to the high caliber of the women competing for …

Using Averages To Create Budgets, Tina N. Barrett

Cornhusker Economics

As we gather and create averages of farm data each year, I’m often asked if the average is a good measure for budgeting. After all no farm is truly “average.” I think by understanding the averages and having some knowledge of your own costs, you can create a meaningful budget for any farm. So what do you need to know about the averages? It is helpful to know the range for the field, the median or middle number, as well as some of the assumptions that are made when gathering the information. A copy of a sample budget at the …

Olympic Readings

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

For those keeping up on coverage of the Olympics and China, the new issue ofForeign Policy has a piece by John Hoberman, professor of German Studies at UT-Austin. In FP’s regular “Think Again” feature (which seeks to challenge conventional wisdom), Hoberman argues that the Olympics are political, are not intended to promote human rights, are not (necessarily) a catalyst for change, don’t generate a lot of revenue for the host or sponsors, are not the most controversial Games ever, and that the IOC is even more corrupt than already reported. In an additional piece, “Prime Numbers: Rings of Gold,” Brad …

Bourgeois Shanghai: Wang Anyi’S Novel Of Nostalgia, Wittenberg University

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

After the recent publication of a translation of Wang Anyi’s 1995 novel A Song of Everlasting Sorrow, we asked Howard Choy to reflect on the novel’s contents and importance. Below, Choy draws on his recently published work on late twentieth century Chinese fiction to contextualize Wang’s Shanghai story.

Among all the major cities in China, Shanghai has become the most popular in recent academic research and creative writings. This is partly a consequence of its resuscitation under Deng Xiaoping’s (1904-1997) intensified economic reforms in the 1990s, and partly due to its unique experience during one hundred years (1843-1943) of colonization …

Rates Of Return To Public Agricultural Research In 48 U.S. States, Alejandro Plastina, Lilyan E. Fulginiti

Department of Agricultural Economics: Faculty Publications

The internal rate of return (IRR) to public investment in agricultural R&D is estimated for each of the continental U.S. states. Theoretically, our contribution provides a way of obtaining the returns to a local public good using Rothbart’s concept of virtual prices. Empirically, we use the spatial dependency among states generated by knowledge spillovers to define the ‘appropriate’ jurisdiction. We estimate an average own-state rate of 17% and a social rate of 29%. These figures should inform the policy debate on the allocation of federal funds to research in the actual food crisis environment.

Rates Of Return To Public Agricultural Research In 48 U.S. States, Alejandro Plastina, Lilyan E. Fulginiti

Lilyan E. Fulginiti Publications

The internal rate of return (IRR) to public investment in agricultural R&D is estimated for each of the continental U.S. states. Theoretically, our contribution provides a way of obtaining the returns to a local public good using Rothbart’s concept of virtual prices. Empirically, we use the spatial dependency among states generated by knowledge spillovers to define the ‘appropriate’ jurisdiction. We estimate an average own-state rate of 17% and a social rate of 29%. These figures should inform the policy debate on the allocation of federal funds to research in the actual food crisis environment.

China Images From The Library Of Congress

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

For those always on the lookout for more teaching images, you may be interested in taking a gander at the Library of Congress’s Flickr account. Though mainly featuring images of the United States (altogether about 4,000 images), if you search “China” at the top of the page you will receive several pages of images from or about China. (You can easily download the images to your computer by clicking on the photo, then selecting “all sizes,” then selecting “download the original size.”) These fascinating images include the photos below, taken between 1910 and 1915. The first is a photograph of …

After The Olympics, What?, Nicolai Volland

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Exactly one month before the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games, all attention seems to be focused on those magic sixteen days, from August 8 through August 24. It is surprising, however, how rarely the question is raised: what will happen once the Games are over?

In the run-up to the Summer Games, China has been placed under an undeclared state of emergency. Special regulations and restrictions are effecting almost every of daily life. Taxi drivers and Beijing residents had to brush up their English and study brochures that explained how to stand in line and be courteous to foreigners. …

Most Downloaded Documents For June 2008, University Of Nebraska–Lincoln Digital Commons

Institutional Repository Information

Shows the 199 most-downloaded documents for the month of June 2008 from http://digitalcommons.unl.edu
For the month, 123,338 downloads of open-access documents were furnished (a new high).
81% of available documents were downloaded at least once.
The average number of downloads per available document was 8.0.

The top 15 were: VOLE CONTROL IN THE EASTERN UNITED STATES - 1,231
Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection Bibliography - Volume II: English and European Languages (2000)- 736
The Constitutions of the Free-Masons (1734). An Online Electronic Edition - 460
EFFECTS OF OFFSHORE OIL AND GAS DEVELOPMENT: A CURRENT AWARENESS BIBLIOGRAPHY - 417
A REMARKABLE NEW …

An Inquiry Into The Ethnography Of Afghanistan, Prepared And Presented To The Ninth International Congress Of Orientalists (1891), Henry Walter Bellew

Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection

No abstract provided.

The Republican River: Negotiation, Arbitration, And A Federal Water Master, J. David Aiken

Cornhusker Economics

Nebraska is in violation of the Republican River Compact Settlement for 2006 by an estimated 41,430 acre-feet (AF) of water. Kansas has claimed damages of $72 million for Nebraska’s settlement violations, has demanded irrigation cutbacks of nearly 50 percent, and has initiated formal arbitration proceedings under the settlement for resolving compliance disagreements. If Nebraska and Kansas are unable to negotiate a compromise on the water overuse, it is possible that a Federal Water Master would be appointed to ensure that future Nebraska water use stayed within settlement limits.

Out And About

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

It’s been a while since we’ve done a reading round-up–here a few things we’ve been reading (and writing) on the web lately:

1. If you’ve been picking up rumblings about “soy sauce” and “push ups” and haven’t been able to sort out the details, the always savvy Sky Canaves (with Juliet Ye this time) at Wall Street Journal‘s China Blog sorts it out for you. Check out Time‘s report for the basics. As CDT reports, debates over the Wengan riots have turned to the topic of internet censorship, while EastSouthWestNorth notesthat discussions of the incident are cooling down.

2. Looking …

The Food, Conservation, And Energy Act Of 2008 Summary And Possible Consequences, Wesley L. Harris, Bradley Lubben, James L. Novak, Larry D. Sanders

Department of Agricultural Economics: Presentations, Working Papers, and Gray Literature

The primary purpose of this article is to provide a summary and briefly comment on key provisions of the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 (PL 110-246) and discuss possible consequences of the selected provisions. As passed by the House and Senate, the act contains 15 titles (the pdf version covering 683 pages). While most provisions will be at least briefly discussed, more attention will be devoted to the production-related provisions, especially substantive changes from the 2002 act. The general title of any new farm bill is telling in both what is significant in the bill and in what …

Overview Of The 2008 Farm Bill, Bradley Lubben

Department of Agricultural Economics: Presentations, Working Papers, and Gray Literature

The following presentations summarize various titles and sections of the 2008 Farm Bill and provide program details and mechanics of the new legislation as well as potential impacts of the new programs. The presentations were delivered at the 2008 Farm Bill Education Conference and serve as both an outline of the new programs as well as a working template for further education and analysis. The conference was organized by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln along with Auburn University, The University of Georgia, and Oklahoma State University. The conference was sponsored through grants from the Farm Foundation and the North Central Risk …

Service Encounters, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The action in Amy Hanser’s Service Encounters (Stanford University Press, 2008) moves smoothly among three separate but related urban consumer settings in Harbin: the Mao-era relic of Harbin No. X department store, Sunshine Department Store, a swanky oversized shrine to the new conspicuous consumption of wealthy Chinese, and the chaotic marketplace of The Underground, where young women will literally sell the shirts off their backs when presented with the opportunity. Hanser, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, focuses on these three sites as she examines the shifts that have taken place in Chinese retail practices …