Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Birth Cohort Differences In Features Of Antisocial Alcoholism Among Men And Women, S. F. Stoltenberg, E. M. Hill, S. A. Mudd, F. C. Blow, R. A. Zucker

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Background: This study examines the relations between birth cohort, gender, and family history of alcohol problems on alcohol dependence, and on the endorsement of alcohol abuse/dependence symptoms related to antisocial behavior. Methods: Men (n = 1365) and women (n = 625) were recruited from the community, hospitals, and other treatment sites and were given a structured diagnostic interview. Data were analyzed by using logistic regression. Results: Age of first regular alcohol use was lower in more recent birth cohorts for both men and women, with those born in the most recent cohort reporting earliest regular use. The decline …

Review Of The Mirage Of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources For The 21st Century, Edited By Brian L. Hawkins & Patricia Battin, Joan Giesecke

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

In all, the collection of essays does accomplish the editors' goal of focusing on the issues that are emerging as digital technologies transform our campuses and our libraries. As one might anticipate, the collection is a bit uneven, as some pieces are clearly geared to the novice in the field while others are more useful for experienced administrators. There is also a fair amount of repetition found between the pieces as each author included basic information in their works. For example, the statistics on rising costs of journals and decreasing ability of libraries to purchase monograph and journals appear frequently …

Public Trust And Confidence In The Courts: What Public Opinion Surveys Mean To Judges, David B. Rottman, Alan Tomkins

Alan Tomkins Publications

In August 1998 a comprehensive national survey added to the growing mass of information on how the public perceives the state courts. The “Perceptions of the U.S. Justice System,” commissioned by the American Bar Association, relied on telephone interviews of 1,000 American adults selected at random. The respondents were asked for their opinions about “the justice system,” lawyers, judges, law enforcement and the courts. The findings from the ABA survey were optimistic relative to most of the previous surveys. Public confidence in the courts relative to other major institutions seemed higher, and experience with courts appeared to promote higher rather …

Final Report: Nebraska Child Support Collection And Disbursement System Implementation Project, Alan Tomkins, Nancy C. Shank

Alan Tomkins Publications

In June, 1999, the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center (PPC) was asked by the Executive Board of the Nebraska Legislature to undertake a study of child support issues. Specifically, the PPC was asked to recommend how Nebraska can preserve existing strengths and reduce or eliminate weakness in its child support customer service system as the state complies with a federal mandate and develops a centralized State Disbursement Unit (SDU) for the receipting and disbursement of child support payments.

In order to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the present customer service system in Nebraska, as well as learn …

Introduction To International Perspectives On Therapeutic Jurisprudence, Alan Tomkins, David Carson

Alan Tomkins Publications

Therapeutic Jurisprudence (TJ), a concept first conceived by law professors David Wexler (University of Puerto Rico and University of Arizona) and Bruce Winick (University of Miami) only a little more than a decade ago, has emerged as the leading conceptual perspective in the mental health law field. Indeed, a LEXIS search reveals well over 150 articles on, or citing to, therapeutic jurisprudence in American law review publications in the past decade (terms used were “therapeutic w/5 jurisprudence w/25 Wexler or Winick”).

Although initially a notion that provided an alternative to the traditional “rights” approach to thinking about mental health law …

The Contexts Of Scholarship, Evaluation And Rewards: A Report Of The Nebraska Network 21 Action Team On Scholarship, Evaluation And Rewards, Stephen S. Hilliard, Gary D. Lynne, Dick Fleming

Nebraska Network 21: Publications

Institutions of higher education need to rethink the ways they recognize, support, evaluate and reward academic work in order to make their formal systems receptive to change and to ensure equitable treatment of faculty and staff. This should be linked with a return to collaborative governance structures and leadership practices that set priorities and assign work with the active participation of the concerned members of the academic community. Better ways of setting priorities and assigning work are basic to effective evaluation and reward systems.

These general propositions can be divided into seven recommendations:

1. Higher education institutions should evaluate and …

Metadata In A Digital Special Library: The Energy And Environmental Information Resources Center In Lafayette, Louisiana, Dan Foley

E-JASL 1999-2009 (Volumes 1-10)

This paper discusses three kinds of metadata and how they are used in the Energy & Environmental Information Resources Center (EE-IR Center), a digital special library of text, numeric, and geospatial data, located in Lafayette, Louisiana. These metadata are Dublin Core (DC), MARC21 (formerly USMARC), and Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) metadata.

The EE-IR Center was formed as a partnership between the National Wetlands Research Center (NWRC) of the U.S. Geological Survey and the Center for Advanced Computer Studies of the University of Southwestern Louisiana (CACS/USL). Both partners are located in Lafayette, Louisiana. The EE-IR Center is funded by a …

Learning Communities: A Selective Overview Of Academic Library Involvement, Jean-Paul Orgeron

E-JASL 1999-2009 (Volumes 1-10)

In 1932, Alexander Meiklejohn published a book that addressed the implementation of learning communities at the University of Wisconsin in 1927. The book, The Experimental College, serves as proof of the existence of such communities well over sixty years ago. It is clear that in the mid to late 1990s learning communities have piqued the curiosities of students and teaching faculty alike. Though they go by different names at various colleges and universities, and have somewhat different components, the common idea of learning communities is to have from two to four courses linked so that the courses have the same …

Inspec On Firstsearch: An Evaluation And Tutorial For Effective Searching, Lutishoor Salisbury, Usha Gupta

E-JASL 1999-2009 (Volumes 1-10)

This paper focuses on providing critical evaluation and searching tips for users of the INSPEC database on FirstSearch on the Web. It introduces the idea of records and fields, fields searching to focus a search for effective retrieval, and the use of the Related Headings feature. Also explained is the idea of precision searching using the proximity operators and bound-phrase searching capabilities. Other ways to search for specific types of information (for example, foreign names, reviews, theses and dissertations, and chemical searching) are also presented. We provide practical examples to illustrate the search features using the Basic, Advanced, and Command …

A Model Job Training Program For Summer Youth: Library Interns At Grambling State University A. C. Lewis Memorial Library, Grambling, Louisiana, Sally Carroll, Sandy Stokley

E-JASL 1999-2009 (Volumes 1-10)

A six-week university library intern program sponsored by the Job Training Partnership Act investigated the impact on 12 economically disadvantaged young persons facing nationally recognized problems pertaining to inadequate reading and math skills, work ethics, job skills, and motivation to complete school. Participants, predominantly (92%) African-American high school students, worked at Grambling State University, an historically black university, under predominantly (85%) African-American supervisors. Interns received academic enrichment, work experience, and life skills, primarily through pre-testing, classroom training, orientations by departmental supervisor, "hands-on" group projects, written assignments, daily reviews, and post-testing. Statistical data verify recommendations in the literature that job training …

Flyer By Night: A Cautionary Review, Richard Defoe

E-JASL 1999-2009 (Volumes 1-10)

Review of Bio-rhythms, Biological Clocks and Periodicity: Index of New Information with Authors & Subjects by Preston G. Parke. ABBE Publishers Association of Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. 1996. $49.50.

The flyer piqued our interest: a hot topic that students were trying to find pre-packaged for their reports and essays. One hundred and sixty pages full of the most recent articles on bio-rhythms -- with index. A reasonable price, for this day, was demanded. The book was ordered, cataloged, prepped and placed on the new books for reference truck. Twenty minutes later, the book had been withdrawn and a note made …

Have Price Policies Damaged Ldc Agricultural Productivity?, Lilyan E. Fulginiti, Richard K. Perrin

Department of Agricultural Economics: Faculty Publications

This paper examines price policies and agricultural productivity in 18 developing countries over the period 1961—1985. We measure productivity with both a nonparametric Malmquist index and a production function, confirming previous findings of declining agricultural productivity, but with sufficient inconsistencies as to raise concern about the adequacy of the methods. We nonetheless find considerable support for the hypothesis that unfavorable price policies have damaged agricultural productivity performance in these countries.
Beginning in the mid 1960s and continuing into the 1980s the "green revolution" swept across the agricultural sectors of many less developed countries (LDCs), a revolution consisting of new varieties …

Great Plains Research, Volume 9, Volume 2, Fall 1999

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Contents:

Calls for papers
Conferences

Review Of A Classification Of North American Biotic Communities By David E. Brown, Frank Reichenbacher, Susan E. Franson, Robert B. Kaul

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

This is the latest of many efforts over the past century to classify North America's natural, undisturbed biological communities as they existed in pre-agrarian times and in many places continue to exist today. Its authors' stated objective is to integrate existing works into a hierarchical synthesis that can lead to a standardized system for researchers, land managers, conservation groups, and government agencies. To that end, the authors have modified and expanded David Brown's earlier classification for the Southwest to cover the continent, defined here as the area from the Panama Canal to the Arctic, including Greenland and some of the …

Review Of Grassland Dynamics: Long-Term Ecological Research In Tallgrass Prairie Edited By Alan K. Knapp, John M. Briggs, David C. Hartnett, And Scott L. Collins, Mary Ann Vinton

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

This book summarizes the wealth of new information on tallgrass prairie ecology gleaned from over fifteen years of intensive study of the Konza Prairie Research Natural Area in the Flint Hills of northeastern Kansas. Because the Flint Hills' steep topography and shallow soils made the region unsuitable for plowing, the area contains the largest tracts of native tallgrass prairie anywhere. The 3,427 hectare Konza site has been the focus of research since 1972 and funded since 1981 by the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program. LTER also funds research at twenty other sites representing all major North American …

Review Of Reducing Soil Water Evaporation With Tillage And Straw Mulching By S. K. Jalota And S. S. Prihar, Gail A. Wicks

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The future of rain-fed agriculture depends upon reducing soil water evaporation and improving soil water storage. We must reduce runoff and increase water infiltration. By keeping more crop residue on the soil surface, growers are reducing erosion. Increased water infiltration has led to problems in some areas where fallow was practiced by causing saline seeps. Farmers will adapt to farming methods that conserve more soil water and increase crop production.

Reducing Soil Water Evaporation with Tillage and Straw Mulching presents an excellent review of the literature (over 230 research papers) explaining the process of reducing water evaporation with tillage and …

Review Of A Color Handbook Of Diseases Of Small Grain Cereal Crops By T. D. Murray, D. W. Parry, And N. D. Cattlin, William W. Bockus

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

When I received A Color Handbook of Diseases of Small Grain Cereal Crops, the first thing that came to mind was "Do we really need another one of these books?" I went to my bookshelf and pulled out no fewer than eight volumes and pamphlets depicting wheat or small grain diseases with color photographs as an aid to identification. After reading the Handbook, however, I have concluded that two major features may make it one of my top two references in this area. Foremost is its outstanding gallery of, full-color pictures. Nigel Cattlin may well be our day's premier …

Table Of Contents- Fall 1999

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

"The Silent Artillery Of Time": Understanding Social Change In The Rural Midwest

Community Dreaming In The Rural Northwest: The Montana Study, 1944-47

Romantic Women And La Lucha: Denise Chavez's Face Of An Angel

Whither Cowboy Poetry?

Book Reviews

Book Notes

From The Editor

Notes And News

Index

Prairie Grasslands: An Undervalued Resource Grass, Cows And Environmental Management On The Canadian Prairies, Jilll S. Vaisey, Peggy Strankman

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Grasslands are integral to the economic health of Canada's rural prairies, making up 30% of the agricultural land base in Canada's three prairie provinces. These grasslands support agriculture, through grazing of livestock, and recreation, such as hunting and ecotourism. These grasslands are also environmentally significant, providing habitat for native plants and animals. The economic and environmental significance of these grasslands should not be undervalued. Economic opportunities and environmental policies and regulations affect the management of these lands. Current issues that may affect how the prairie is used include the: potential species-at-risk legislation, other initiatives for biodiversity enhancement, greenhouse gas regulations …

The Structure And Function Of Ecosystems In The Central North American Grassland Region, W. K. Luaenroth, I .C. Burke, M. P. Gutmann

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The central grassland region occupies the center of North America in the United States, Canada and Mexico and is a unique resource for the continent. While there are no other areas with comparable features, the largest similar grassland areas occur in Europe and Asia. The uniqueness of the region derives from its size, its relative flatness, and the smoothness of its physical gradients. The smooth gradients in precipitation and temperature are the reasons why most gradients in ecosystem properties are also smooth. The west-east gradient in precipitation and the north-south gradient in temperature result in corresponding gradients in plant community …

Comparative Ecology Of Bison And Cattle On Mixed-Grass Prairie, Allen Steuter, Lori Hidinger

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

We study bison (Bos bison) herds that are managed year-long without protein or energy supplements in large mixed prairie pastures in Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. We also manage cattle (B. taurus) grazing during the growing season in separate, but adjacent pastures. Management reflects the divergent evolution of bison and cattle with their respective human cultures and landscapes. Bison exhibit a stronger preference for the perennial grasses that form the prairie matrix, and they are strongly attracted to open landscapes during the growing season. Cattle include more forbs in their diet, and they use wooded …

Review Of Valley Of Grass: Tallgrass Prairie And Parkland Of The Red River Valley Region By Kim Alan Chapman, Adelheid Fischer, And Mary Kinsella Ziegenhagen, Tom Domek

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

A great deal has been made of the dire circumstances facing imperiled tallgrass ecosystems in the future-and with good reason. With more than 98 percent of all tallgrass and tallgrass savanna already converted to cultivated farmland and other nearly irreversible land uses, tallgrass ecosystems now teeter on the brink of total collapse. Into this bleak condition leap the authors of Valley of Grass: Tallgrass Prairie and Parkland of the Red River Valley Region. Remarkably, they strike a refreshingly non-confrontational, almost optimistic posture. Their thesis? That the restoration and rehabilitation of the tallgrass prairie and the continued use of its …

Estimation Of Demand For Wheat By Classes For The United States And The European Union, Samarendu Mohanty, E. Wesley F. Peterson

Department of Agricultural Economics: Faculty Publications

This study estimates demand for wheat differentiated by classes using a dynamic AIDS model for the United States and the European Union (EU). The results suggest that imported wheat is more price responsive than domestic wheat in the U.S. market but not in the EU market. This may suggest that the Canadian policy that reduces prices of Canadian wheat in the U.S. market or U.S. export subsidies that raise prices of U.S., wheat could be expected to give rise to substantial substitution of Canadian for U.S. wheat. It is also found that in the EU, complementary relationships exist between spring …

Review Of The Evolving Science Of Grassland Improvement By L. R. Humphreys, William K. Lauenroth

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The Great Plains consisted of several million square kilometers of native perennial grasslands in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most is still grassland, but on more than half the area native perennials have been replaced by single species annuals harvested for grain. For many of us who live and work in the region, the term grassland is reserved for native perennial grasslands, one of the elements of the current mosaic of land cover types that comprise the contemporary Great Plains. This is a narrow definition of grassland and only a small part of what L. R. Humphreys is referring …

Review Of Agronomy Of Grassland Systems, Second Edition By C. J. Pearson And R. L. Ison, David Bade

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Agronomy of Grassland Systems is an excellent reference, textbook, or guide for the forage professional, the best I have read promoting looking at forages in a systematic manner. It challenges researchers, extension specialists, consultants, and producers to think of their work as it fits into forage systems on a local or global basis. Using research from around the world, the book offers a unique global perspective; at the same time local producers will find it a practical reference for agronomic principles.

Review Of Under The Blade: The Conversion Of Agricultural Landscapes Edited By Richard K. Olson And Thomas A. Lyson, Gordon Scholz

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Loss of agricultural land to other land uses is an issue of growing concern in the United States. A number of studies in recent years have drawn attention to the extent of agricultural land loss and have stimulated considerable discussion about the impacts of changing land use patterns. The 1992 National Resources Inventory by the US Department of Agriculture indicated that conversion of agricultural and forest lands to non-agricultural uses is occurring at an average rate of at least 1.4 million acres per year.

Because conversion of farmland to other uses is practically irreversible, even over a fairly long timespan, …

Review Of Ecosystem Management: Applications For Sustainable Forest And Wildlife Resources Edited By Mark S. Boyce And Alan Haney, Roger Suffling

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

The papers in this volume, gathered from a March 1994 symposium at the University of Wisconsin, survey the field of ecosystem management, are avowedly oriented toward the US, and concentrate on forest systems, though readers from abroad and those interested in aquatic systems and grasslands will also find matters of interest here. The editors have organized the book into five sections. "Ecological Framework" embraces ecosystem management, landscape ecology, keystone ecosystems, maintenance of rare species, and the role of mineral cycling. The "Disturbance" chapters cover riparian habitats and forested wetlands. "Techniques and Classification" includes classification of ecological landscape units, GIS and …

Educational Quality And County Government Services: Rural Nebraskans' Perceived Impacts Of Recent And Proposed Legislation, John C. Allen, R. Filkins, Sam Cordes

Publications from the Center for Applied Rural Innovation (CARI)

Many changes have been occurring in rural Nebraska in the area of local finances. Recent school finance legislation has changed the formula that distributes state aid to schools (LB 806) and also imposed new property tax levy limits on school districts (LB 1114). Discussions have also arisen about consolidating county offices and services. Given all these changes, how do rural Nebraskans feel about these issues? How do they feel the new school finance legislation has affected the quality of education in their local school district? Do they support the consolidation of certain county government offices and services with a neighboring …

Recent Biodiversity Patterns In The Great Plains: Implications For Restoration And Management, Carolyn Hull Sieg, Curtis H. Flather, Stephan Mccanny

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

Ecosystem, species and genetic dimensions of biodiversity have eroded since widespread settlement of the Great Plains. Conversion of native vegetation in the region followed the precipitation gradient, with the greatest conversion in the eastern tallgrass prairie and eastern mixed-grass types. Areas now dominated by intensive land uses are "hot spots" for exotic birds. However, species of all taxa listed as threatened or endangered are well-distributed across the Great Plains. These species are often associated with special landscape features, such as wetlands, rivers, caves, sandhills and prairie dog towns. In the long run, sustaining biodiversity in the Great Plains, and the …

Response Of Buffalograss (Buchloe Dactyloides) And Blue Grama (Bouteloua Gracilis) To Fire, Paulette Ford

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences

I analyzed primary literature, spanning 42 years (1948-1990) that addressed buffalograss and blue grama's response to fire; no relevant literature has been published since 1990. The results suggest that fire in shortgrass steppe need not be negative. Plant response to fire depends mainly on levels of precipitation, though some studies indicated that the season during which fire occurs may also affect recovery of buffalograss and blue grama.