Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Solar Energy: A Fresh Look At The Sun, Sarah Kruse

Papers from "UHON395 Carbonomics: Can Bioenergy save the World?"

This paper was my attempt to give solar energy a voice in the midst of discussion about the growing problems with global warming, fossil fuels, and bio-fuels. In reading and studying these topics, it becomes clear that with or without considering the damage fossil fuels are doing to the planet, there are many economic and political reasons to seriously consider alternative sources of energy. However, switching to new sources should be done with careful consideration of their own pros and cons. In my reading about solar energy, the pros seemed undeniable and the cons seemed surmountable. Solar energy has not …

Carbon Farming: A Look At Carbon Sequestration In Agriculture, Joshua Van De Walle

Papers from "UHON395 Carbonomics: Can Bioenergy save the World?"

Everywhere you look, there is someone talking about global warming or the environment. Currently, there is a lot of hype about the ethanol industry. People are genuinely interested in the environment, perhaps more than ever before. Therefore, I decided to write this paper on the carbon farming and how farmers can capture the economic benefit of sequestering carbon. I will explain the importance of carbon sequestration, what a cap-and-trade policy is, the ability for agriculture to help out, ways in which the farmer can help out, and how offsets can be provided by the newly created Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX).

China And Global Warming, Andrew Hassing

Papers from "UHON395 Carbonomics: Can Bioenergy save the World?"

China has recently become the world’s greatest greenhouse gas emitter, surpassing the United States. The unprecedented growth of the economy and population surpassed all expectations. Coal is the cheapest and most abundant source of energy for this expansion. Also, worries of energy dependence complicate the matters. The effects of global warming can be seen throughout the countryside. Although it does not currently have any mandatory emission regulations, China has put forth many initiatives to reverse this trend. More efficient technology is in development, such as advanced coal uses. Other sources of energy like hydroelectric, solar, wind, bio, and nuclear are …

Impact Of Biofuels On Forestland In Central America, Ayako Ebata

Papers from "UHON395 Carbonomics: Can Bioenergy save the World?"

Although biofuels are thought to be one of the solutions for reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the net effects might be ambiguous when indirect land use effects are incorporated. Along with the increasing price of biofuel crops, forest lands might be destroyed throughout the world. In this study, the net effect of the increases in U.S. production of corn due to ethanol demand is explored in terms of additional land impacts and deforestation in Central America. I present data from FAO and Searchinger et al, where it is suggested that the Central American region has been in the process …

Building A Lightweight Future For American Transportation, Jennifer D. Schmidt

Papers from "UHON395 Carbonomics: Can Bioenergy save the World?"

New materials are being sought out to replace steel in conventional American vehicles as a way to increase fuel efficiency. Carbon fiber composites are lightweight materials that could replace steel without decreasing strength or safety of a vehicle. These new composites have the possibility of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and increasing overall efficiency of a vehicle throughout its lifetime. Carbon fiber production has the potential to be less carbon intensive than steel production, and it could increase the efficiency of a manufacturing plant due to its compactness and to new technology. Fuel efficiency can be improved by using many techniques …

A Social Relations Model Of Everyday Talk And Relational Satisfaction In Stepfamilies, Paul Schrodt, Jordan Soliz, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This study examined the intrapersonal and interpersonal mechanisms underlying reported frequencies of everyday talk and relational satisfaction in stepfamilies. Participants included a parent, stepparent, and child from 114 stepfamilies (N = 342) from the Midwest and Southwest regions of the United States. Social relations model analyses revealed that everyday talk and relational satisfaction vary across stepfamily relationships as a function primarily of actor and relationship effects. Stepparents’ reports of everyday talk with the parent (i.e., their spouse) varied primarily as a function of actor effects, whereas reports of both children’s and parents’ satisfaction with the stepparent varied primarily as a …

Updating The Farm Bill Safety Net In An Expanding Sea Of Risk, Wes Harris, Bradley Lubben, James Novak, Larry Sanders

Department of Agricultural Economics: Faculty Publications

Several months past due, the Food, Conservation and Energy Act (FCEA) of 2008 (P.L. 110-246) is now law. Reform, budget, and national and international politics were central issues fueling a debate that resulted in this new bill. Whether this new Farm Bill will ultimately succeed in providing an adequate farm and food safety net and whether it is a “good” or “bad” bill depends on one’s perspective. As to cost, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores the bill at $307 billion for a 5–year period (2008–2012), with 68% going to nutrition, 11% to commodity programs, 8% of estimated expenditures to …

Trafficking In Persons Report, June 2008, Us Department Of State

Human Trafficking: Data and Documents

The Department of State is required by law to submit a Report each year to the U.S. Congress on foreign governments’ efforts to eliminate severe forms of traffi cking in persons. This Report is the eighth annual TIP Report. It is intended to raise global awareness, to highlight efforts of the international community, and to encourage foreign governments to take effective actions to counter all forms of traffi cking in persons.

Contents
Introduction 4-37 The 2008 Trafficking in Persons Report 5-18
Purpose 5
Human Trafficking Defined 6
The Scope and Nature of Modern-Day Slavery 7
Focus of the 2008 TIP …

The Forbidden City By Barmé—Don’T Leave For The “Great Within” Without It

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

“I think there’s a lack of books that serious, educated non-specialists can pick up…I’ve read a lot of great books recently by academics but few that I could recommend, say, to my father.” These lines come from an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Ian Johnson that “China Beat” ran at the end of January, back when our site was still young (now that we’ve been going for more than a third-of-a-year, we hardly count as youthful anymore, so quickly does the blogosphere change). He was responding to a question Nicole Barnes had put to him about what he’d like …

Nebraska Farm Real Estate Market Developments 2007-2008, Bruce Johnson, Ben Blomendahl, Ryan Lukassen

Nebraska Farm Real Estate Reports

In this, the 30th year of the UNL Farm Real Estate Market Developments Survey and report series, some of the most dramatic changes ever in the market have occurred. During the year ending February 1st 2008, the average value of Nebraska farmland rose 23%, the largest annual increase in the series. Virtually every region of the state experienced strong cropland value increases. Cash rental rates experienced record advances as well, with 2008 levels for the cropland classes being 17% to 24% higher than 2007 levels. Clearly, the agricultural real estate market has responded to crop commodity prices which have shot …

Supracutaneous Vibrotactile Perception Threshold At Various Non-Glabrous Body Loci, Miriam Bikah, M. Susan Hallbeck, John H. Flowers

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Researchers at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln are currently designing a wearable/portable neutron detector. As an alerting mechanism, the device will transmit vibration to the wearer’s skin in the presence of hazardous levels of neutron radiation. The present study was designed to help in the ergonomically correct body placement of the neutron detection device while providing numerical values for vibratory thresholds at the surface of various non-glabrous body loci. The aim of the study was to investigate the underlying effects of locus stimulated, amount of subcutaneous fat around a specific body site and gender on low frequency vibration thresholds. Thirty-six participants, …

A Good Attitude Goes Far, Carla Kimbrough

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

You could be one of the greatest talents in your newsroom, but if you have a lousy attitude, you may not go as far as you'd expect. A negative attitude will cause you to grumble about assignments, even the pretty good ones. Your superior talent may take you far, but colleagues celebrate your departure — and not because they're happy for you. A lousy attitude is not a forever sentence. Here are some tips to help you turn your attitude around.

Social Network Characteristics And Risky Sexual And Drug Related Behaviors Among Homeless Young Adults, Kimberly A. Tyler

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Although research finds high rates of risky sexual and drug related behavior among homeless young people, little research had examined how the characteristics of their social networks encourage or constrain risky behaviors. Based on a sample of 145 homeless young adults in the Midwestern United States, results revealed that having used alcohol with at least one of their network members and the presence of more conflict was associated with engaging in a greater number of sexual risk taking behaviors. Correlates of engaging in a greater number of substance use related behaviors included having older peers within the network, having used …

The Chinese Press In The Spotlight, Timothy Weston

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In recent weeks, the Chinese press has struggled to cover a series of major and difficult stories. Moreover the Chinese press itself is being watched and critiqued by the Western world with intensity and curiosity. What we are seeing in the Chinese press now is a world in transition and flux.

First was the Chinese press’ discussion of the Tibetan demonstrations, its virtual refusal to acknowledge the validity of any foreign criticism, and its exposure of a reflexive, threatening, and brittle nationalism, especially among some Chinese youth. However, that was followed by its honest and educational reporting during the hand …

Culture And Collapse, Pierre Fuller

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

China has shown a “dismayingly cavalier attitude toward the well-being of its people,” a British journalist turned pop historian determined recently in the pages of the New York Times. The Chinese, he explained, long ago handed over science – and by extension earthquake resistant engineering – to “the West,” leaving “themselves to become mired, time and again, in the kind of tragic events that we are witnessing this week.” The thrust of this piece by Simon Winchester (which simultaneously appeared in the International Herald Tribune and evidently stems from his latest books, The Man Who Loved China (2008), on Joseph …

Exploiting A Research Underclass In Phase 1 Clinical Trials, Carl Elliott, Roberto Abadie

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

In November 1996, the Wall Street Journal reported that Eli Lilly was paying homeless alcoholics from a local shelter to participate in safety testing of new drugs at its trial site in Indianapolis.1 “These individuals want to help society,” asserted Lilly’s director of clinical pharmacology. The subjects, however, said they took part for easy money and free room and board. Although Lilly reportedly offered the lowest per diem in the business, it managed to attract poor subjects from all over the country.1 The medical director of the local Homeless Initiative Program said Lilly had created a “shadow economy” of paid …

Praise For China: A Reader

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. “Can we outsource FEMA to the Chinese?” asks one reader at MSNBC’s World Blog, in response to a post on the temporary villages the Chinese government is erecting in the disaster area. Other readers also make Katrina/China earthquake comparisons. The MSNBC World Blog has been providing continuing coverage of the earthquake.

2. One of the side effects of coverage of the earthquake has been an increase in “human interest” stories on quake survivors. For instance, the story of a couple who survived together, trapped under debris, was one of the New York Times’s top e-mailed stories in the days …

Community Vision Is Important To New Residents, Charlotte Narjes, Cheryl A. Burkhart-Kriesel

Cornhusker Economics

New residents to the Nebraska Panhandle want to see their communities succeed. To better understand the reasons new residents move to the Panhandle, twelve focus groups were held across the region. The focus groups are part of a University of NebraskaSLincoln research project funded by a 2006 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Research Initiative (USDA-NRI), looking at the characteristics and motivations of new residents in the eleven counties. The research project includes a demographic study, a mail survey to new residents, an iterative three-phase survey process to community development practitioners and a focus group of new …

A Typology Of Librarian Status At Land Grant Universities, Mary K. Bolin

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

Data were gathered on librarian status at fifty land grant universities. The findings reveal four status types: Professorial, Other ranks with tenure, Other ranks without tenure, and Academic or Professional Staff. Eighty percent of institutions have librarians who are faculty and 85 percent of those are tenure-track.

Cultural Responses To Disaster In China, Pierre Fuller

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A land of floods, fault lines and food crises, China has rarely been one of mercy in the Western imagination. Today, with millions of Chinese dealing with another world-class disaster on their soil, the Western press appears to be singing a different tune. For one, Tuesday’s New York Times heralded that “Many Hands, Not Held by China, Aid in Quake,” reporting that even official Chinese media sees private donations exceeding the state’s total so far of half a billion relief dollars. This “striking and unscripted public response” of “blood drives, cake sales, charity fund-raisers and art auctions” might even pose …

Self-Promotion Saturday: Brief Notes

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A few of our writers made it into the news this week:

1. NPR broadcast a brief interview with Jeff Wasserstrom on the Chinese government’s response to the earthquake on Wednesday, May 21.

2. In response to a review of Simon Winchester’s new book on Joseph Needham (the famous scholar of Chinese technology, among his other accomplishments) at Salon.com, one reader submitted a lengthy comparison of Jared Diamond and Kenneth Pomeranz. Read it here.

3. For those who subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, you can read an article that quotes Caroline Reeves, who wrote a two-part piece for us …

Writing Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I started writing my book on a March morning in 2006. About fifteen minutes into it, panic hit: I am no longer earning a salary just sitting here at my desk. By mid-morning, another realization had set in: I can’t go back to being a newspaper reporter.

The book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, opens inside the world of the young women working on assembly lines in the south China factory city of Dongguan:

When you met a girl from another factory, you quickly took her measure. “What year are you?” you asked each other, …

Giving Long-Term Relief, Yong Chen

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

May 12, 2008, will enter the history and China and the world as a day of sadness. At 2:30 p.m. local time, a devastating earthquake, registering 7.8 on the Richter scale, hit Wenchuan near Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, and the confirmed death toll has soared to more than 41,000.

This is also a moment of perseverance. There are countless stories of surviving victims of the catastrophe—grieving parents, husbands and wives, children, coworkers, neighbors, classmates—doing all they could to rescue and help others. This is a moment of compassion and humanity. China acted swiftly, sending relief workers, volunteers, soldiers …

Rumor And The Sichuan Earthquake, Steve Smith

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

One of the intriguing aspects of the appalling crisis created by the earthquake in Sichuan on May 12—whose death toll as I write is over 40,000 and still rising—has been the role played by rumor. Just four days before the quake, the Sichuan provincial government issued a notice designed to quell “earthquake rumors.” Three days after it, on May15, Xinhua news agency announced that seventeen people had been arrested for circulating malicious rumors, and the Ministry of Public Security revealed that its bureaus in eleven provinces and municipalities had discovered more than forty messages on the internet that “spread false …

Disaster Relief: Material And Spiritual

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Last night, the members of one of the Buddha’s Light International Association (國際佛光會) relief teams returned to Taiwan, most in tears due to the horrifying devastation they had witnessed. They also reported a disturbing new development: an increasing number of survivors are starting to take their own lives.

To a certain extent, this should not be too surprising. Inland earthquakes often devastate economically deprived regions, where the livelihood of most people hangs by a thin thread even before a disaster strikes. This was the case for Taiwan’s 921 Earthquake, which was also followed by a rash of suicides. Now that …

A Mid-Week Reader

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. If it isn’t already part of your media China blog circuit (it has just become part of ours), check out the Wall Street Journal’s China Journal. Run by Sky Canaves, the blog apparently draws on more than twenty journalists, and even ran a recent entry on Beijing’s air quality (that’s a favorite Western media story that has slipped out of sight lately).

2. Tim Johnson’s blog, China Rises, has a few moving recent on-the-ground reports from Sichuan. Zhongnanhai also has reports from an individual in Sichuan. For detailed information about the earthquake and its casualities (including maps), see the …

North Central Risk Management Education Center, Cheryl Griffith

Cornhusker Economics

The North Central Risk Management Education Center (www.ncrme.org) has provided program coordination for extension risk management education in the North Central Region since 2001. Hosted at the University of Nebraska Agricultural Economics Department, the center recently received approval from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service (CSREES) for an additional $1.2 million in funding through 2010. By that time, six million dollars will have been awarded to the North Central Center for programming in risk management education.

The mission of the center is to provide producers in the North Central Region with the …

History Of Chinese Red Cross: Part Ii, Caroline Reeves

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

As Chinese rush to aid their countrymen and other countries rush to aid the Chinese, it is important to note that Chinese participation in mutual aid and in the international relief community is not new. Here I continue with part II of the earlyhistory of the Chinese Red Cross Society.

At the turn of the twentieth century, China was being torn apart not by the movement of tectonic plates, but by political, social and intellectual currents. In a world shaken by the new imperatives of Social Darwinism (that posited a divide between “modern” nations that would thrive and “backward” ones …

Letters From Sichuan, Peter Hessler

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

On May 13th, I filed a web report on the New Yorker’s site, based on what I heard from former students in the early days of the disaster. Since then, I’ve continued to receive notes, and I’ve copied a few below.

When I lived in Sichuan, I was most impressed by the sense of place. The landscape was rugged and beautiful, and the people had a distinct character. They seemed more emotional than in other parts of China; they laughed more freely and their street arguments were more vicious. It wasn’t any surprise that in 1999, after NATO bombed the …

Chinese Responses To Disaster: A View From The Qing, Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Media reports of this week’s devastating earthquake in Sichuan highlight trends seen as impressive and new in terms of PRC responses to disaster. The quick response of state leaders symbolized by Premier Wen Jiabao’s much-heralded arrival in the disaster area only five hours after the earthquake hit on Monday, for instance, stands in stark contrast to the PRC’s handling of major catastrophes during the Mao-era, when Chairman Mao and other top leaders failed to act on reports that people were starving to death by the thousands during the Great Leap Famine of 1959-61. An estimated 30 million people died as …