Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Pointing The Finger Of Blame: News Media Coverage Of Popular-­Culture Culpability, Erica Scharrer, Lisa M. Weidman, Kimberly Bissell

Faculty Publications

In the 1990s, three relatively high-profile tragedies occurred in which popular media products (including movies, recorded music, television talk shows, the Internet, tabloid newspapers, and video games) were argued to be the primary cause. This study analyzes the discourse surrounding the culpability that was placed on popular culture in major newspaper coverage of the car crash that killed Princess Diana, the murder associated with the “Jenny Jones” show, and the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The analysis reveals patterns in the assignment of blame—and relatively more rarely of exoneration—of popular culture, interpreting why and how popular culture …

Authenticity In The Skateboarding World, Becky Beal, Lisa Weidman

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the values and norms that constitute legitimacy, or authenticity, in the skateboarding world. Both authors spent a considerable amount of time with the skateboarding world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Lisa Weidman worked at a skateboarding magazine for several years, and Becky Beal did an extensive ethnographic study of skateboarders. Using our experiences and research, we describe the characteristics that skateboarders and the industry use to identify an authentic skateboarder. The first section, on the skaters' perspective, is based primarily on Beal's interactions with skateboarders; the second section, on the …

“Legal Or Illegal? Documented Or Undocumented?” The Struggle Over Brookhaven’S Neighborhood Preservation Act, Jackson B. Miller

Faculty Publications

This critical essay applies the concept of “presence” as a theoretical lens for explaining the rhetorical efficacy of protest events surrounding a contemporary debate about immigrants’ rights in a suburban New York township. Specifically, the protests surrounding the town board meetings regarding Brookhaven’s “Neighborhood Preservation Act,” a piece of legislation geared toward making rental laws more stringent, are examined. A group comprised largely of white, upper middle-class citizens voiced their support for the proposed legislation, while a group of day laborers and those sympathetic with their cause characterized the proposed legislation as a form of racial discrimination disguised as a …

Sexual Harassment, Amy E. Street, Jane Stafford, Tamara A. Bruce

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

William E. Doolittle: Mediator Between The World Of Work And The World Of Books, Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Neo-Environmental Determinism, Intellectual Damage Control, And Nature/Society Science, Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Material-Conceptual Landscape Transformation And The Emergence Of The Pristine Myth In Early Colonial Mexico, Andrew Sluyter

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Comparison Of Three Primary Aggregator Databases, Kelly D. Blessinger, Maureen Olle

Faculty Publications

This article explores the results of a study conducted by Louisiana State University Libraries to determine the strengths and weaknesses of three aggregator databases: EBSCO Academic Search Premier, Gale Expanded Academic ASAP, and ProQuest Research Library Core. Main ideas discussed are title coverage, full-text availability, and search features. It is hoped that this article will aid institutions in determining the acquisition of an aggregator database that best meets their institutional needs.

Literacy, Learning And Libraries: Common Issues And Common Concerns, Ken Haycock

Faculty Publications

Discusses common issues in literacy, learning and libraries in Canada. Role of libraries and librarians in literacy; Need to have collaboration between public libraries and school districts on professional family literacy programs; Measures to succeed in making library programs effective for students.

Downstream Geomorphic Impacts Of Large American Dams, William L. Graf

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Testimony In Support Of The Congaree National Park Act Of 2003, William L. Graf

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Teaching Green: Experimenting With Green Values In The Classroom, David Whiteman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Copula Variability In Gullah, Tracey L. Weldon

Faculty Publications

Many researchers have investigated the copula for possible links between African American Vernacular English (aave) and Atlantic Creoles, a connection that has served as the foundation of the Creolist Hypothesis in the on-going debate over the origins of aave. One variety that has been of particular interest in this debate is Gullah, which has been hypothetically linked to aave since some of the earliest statements of the Creolist Hypothesis. To date, however, very little research has been done on copula variability in Gullah itself. This study, therefore, provides an analysis of copula variability in present affirmative contexts in Gullah. Variation …

Raising (And Control), William D. Davies, Stanley William Dubinsky

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Marriage On Tv, Mary E. Hess

Faculty Publications

While it is important for teachers of religion to consider how television portrays marriage, it may be even more important to consider how we use television and how we help people engage the media with critical perception. People of faith need to do a cultural intervention, providing a deep and sustaining vision of what marriage can be over time and in connection with community.

Iran, Mary E. Hegland

Faculty Publications

Iran lies between Iraq and, further north, Turkey to the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and the Caspian Sea border Iran to the north, and thee Persian Gulf to the south. Iran covers 636,293 square miles.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, many people lived by herding animals. Some of the Kurds and the Shahsevan in the northwest, Qashqai, Bakhtiary, Lurs, and Kamseh in the southwest, Baluch in the southeast, and Turkmen in the northeast lived in nomadic camps, traveling with their animals in search of water and pastures. Beginning in the …

Children’S Sociable And Aggressive Behaviour With Peers: A Comparison Of The Us And Australia, And Contributions Of Temperament And Parenting Styles, Alan Russell, Craig H. Hart, Clyde C. Robinson, Susanne F. Olsen

Faculty Publications

Links between both temperament and parenting, and children’s sociable and aggressive behaviour with peers (physical and relational), were examined. The research was undertaken in two Western cultures (the United States and Australia) assumed to be similar in socialisation practices and emphases. The moderating effects of parent sex and child sex were also examined. Parents completed questionnaires on parenting styles and child temperament. Preschool teachers rated children’s aggressive and sociable behaviour. US children were rated higher on both types of aggression by teachers and on sociability, activity, and emotionality by parents. Girls were rated as more relationally aggressive and more prosocial …

From The Individual To Individualism: A Critique Of The Helping Professions, Timothy B. Smith, Matthew R. Draper

Faculty Publications

Individualistic values characterize contemporary society and many popular approaches to mental health treatment. This paper critiques the individualistic values embedded in the helping professions that implicitly contradict the teachings ofJesus Christ, the surest foundation for mental health interventions. Members of AMCAP are encouraged to search out and replace problematic values that contradict gospel teachings which have been integrated into contemporary mental health practice.

Rites Of Passage In Emerging Adulthood: Perspectives Of Young Mormoons, Larry J. Nelson

Faculty Publications

This study explores the role that culture, particularly religious rites of passage, may play in emerging adulthood by examining the demographics, criteria for adulthood, identity development, and risk behavior of Mormon emerging adults.

Doing Loshootseed Morphology By Analogy, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

Analogical modeling (AM) is an exemplar-based general modeling theory that is being applied to an increasing range ofnatural language processing problems. This paper introduces AM as a viable approach to morphological analysis for Lushootseed, and shows results from applying the system to analyze the contents of the transcription of a well-known Lushootseed story. Subsequent discussion mentions the strengths and current weaknesses of the approach. Possible improvements and future applications are also sketched.

Automated Rating Of Esl Essays, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Diane Strong-Krause

Faculty Publications

To date, traditional NLP parsers have not been widely successful in TESOLoriented applications, particularly in scoring written compositions. Re-engineering such applications to provide the necessary robustness for handling ungrammatical English has proven a formidable obstacle. We discuss the use of a nontraditional parser for rating compositions that attenuates some of these difficulties. Its dependency-based shallow parsing approach provides significant robustness in the face of language learners’ ungrammatical compositions. This paper discusses how a corpus of L2 essays for English was rated using the parser, and how the automatic evaulations compared to those obtained by manual methods. The types of modifications …

A Memory-Based Approach To Cantonese Tone Recognition, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Michael Emonts

Faculty Publications

This paper introduces memory-based learning as a viable approach for Cantonese tone recognition. The memorybased learning algorithm employed here outperforms other documented current approaches for this problem, which is based on neural networks. Various numbers of tones and features are modeled to find the best method for feature selection and extraction. To further optimize this approach, experiments are performed to isolate the best feature weighting method, the best class voting weights method, and the best number of k-values to implement. Results and possible future work are discussed.

Book Review Of Silence On The Mountain (Daniel Wilkinson), Michael T. Searcy

Faculty Publications

Recién terminada una guerra civil de 36 años, Guatemala abriga los secretos de la coerción y del genocidio que el mundo tiene que saber. Con la firma del acuerdo de paz entre las fuerzas revolucionarias y los militares en diciembre de 1996, el gobierno acordó formar una comisión de la verdad, conocida como la Comisión para la Clarificación Histórica. Con la esperanza de traer la justicia y acabar con el terror que la gente había experimentado, la comisión recogió los testimonios de millares de personas que habían sido aterrorizados por los militares y la guerrilla. Las historias acababan con un …

Parenting And Adult Development: Contexts, Processes, And Products Of Intergenerational Relationships, Rob Palkovitz, Loren D. Marks, David W. Appleby, Erin K. Holmes

Faculty Publications

For the past 50 years, parenthood has been discussed in social science literature as a context of adult development. Theories, anecdotes, and the opinions of laypersons are nearly unanimous: People who become parents and are involved in the raising of children are transformed and follow a different developmental trajectory from people who do not engage in parenting roles. Erickson (1950) suggested that positive adult development reflects care for the next generation, or "generativity," and that parenthood is "the first, and for many, the prime generative encounter" (Erickson, 1964, p. 130). More recently, parenthood has been described as a necessary but …

Dignity: The New Frontier Of State Sovereignty, Scott Dodson

Faculty Publications

In Federal Maritime Commission v. South Carolina State Ports Authority, the Supreme Court strongly articulated a new “dignity” rationale for state sovereign immunity. The article critiques this rationale and argues that it dissociates sovereign immunity from any constitutional grounding. However, in doing so, the rationale frees the Court to develop a more coherent theory of state sovereign immunity. The article explores how the dignity rationale might be used to develop such coherence.

Ethnic Federalism: Its Promise And Pitfalls For Africa, Alemante G. Selassie

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sharing Indigenous Knowledge: To Share Or Not To Share? That Is The Question, Christine Hagar

Faculty Publications

The Internet and digital technology create new possibilities for the development of cultures,communities and knowledge. Over the last twenty years there has been a great increase in interest inindigenous knowledge from a variety of groups, including academia, development agencies and thecorporate world. Within this diverse range of interests, there have been initiatives to facilitate a globalnetwork to exchange indigenous knowledge by development agencies such as the World Bank's'Indigneous Knowledge for Development Program' and UNESCO's 'Best Practices of IndigenousKnowledge' database. The development agencies appear to be mainly concerned with systematizingindigenous knowledge and looking at the notion of indigenous knowledge as forming …

Judging Distance Across Texture Discontinuities, Cary S. Feria, M. L. Braunstein, G. J. Andersen

Faculty Publications

Sinai et al (1998 Nature 395 497 - 500) showed that less distance is perceived along a ground surface that spans two differently textured regions than along a surface that is uniformly textured. We examined the effect of texture continuity on judged distance using computer-generated displays of simulated surfaces in five experiments. Discontinuities were produced by using different textures, the same texture reversed in contrast, or the same texture shifted horizontally. The simulated surface was either a ground plane or a frontoparallel plane. For all textures and both orientations, less distance was judged in the discontinuous conditions than in continuous …

Searching Large Collections Of Recorded Speech: A Preliminary Study, Jinmook Kim, Douglas W. Oard, Dagobert Soergel

Faculty Publications

This paper reports on an exploratory study of the criteria searchers use when judging the relevance of recorded speech from radio programs and the attributes of a recording on which those judgments are based. Five volunteers each performed three searches using two systems (NPR Online and SpeechBot) for three questions and judged the relevance of the results. Data were collected through observation and screen capture, think aloud, and interviews; coded; and analyzed by looking for patterns. Criteria used as a basis for selection were found to be similar to those observed in relevance studies with printed materials, but the attributes …

Mormons And The Media, 1898-2003: A Selected, Annotated, And Indexed Bibliography (With Suggestions For Future Research), Sherry Baker, Daniel Stout

Faculty Publications

Print, electronic, and other forms of communications media have been consistently perceived and characterized by leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as tools to assist in spreading the gospel message throughout the world. Given this perspective, the Church from its earliest days has used various forms of media as vehicles of communication. It has produced or been affiliated with the production of numerous newspapers and magazines in the United States and in several countries worldwide. In the twentieth century, the Church embraced electronic media technologies promptly. Our goal as mass communications scholars was to compile a …