Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Climate Change Adaptation Chapter: Marshfield, Massachusetts, Joshua H. Chase, Jonathan G. Cooper, Rory Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Filipe Antunes Lima, Sally R. Miller, Toni Marie Pignatelli

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

Climate change, understood as a statistically significant variation in the mean state of the climate or its variability, is the greatest environmental challenge of this generation (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001). Marshfield is already being affected by changes in the climate that will have a profound effect on the town’s economy, public health, coastal resources, natural features, water systems, and public and private infrastructure. Adaptation strategies have been widely recognized as playing an important role in improving a community’s ability to respond to climate stressors by resisting damage and recovering quickly.

Based on review of climate projections for the …

Copyright Developments In 2012 (Version 1.1), Laura Quilter

Laura Quilter

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Plaza: Barcelona’S Okupa Squatters At Work In The Wake Of La Crisis, Justin Helepololei

Justin AK Helepololei

As ongoing, financial crisis has kept millions in precarity - and over 40% of Spain's youth unemployed - mass mobilizations of the country's indignados have continued to fill the country's streets and plazas. Nearly one year after the original 15M demonstrations, city-wide occupations have triggered a profusion of more localized and issue-based assemblies. Beyond the plazas, squatter-activists of Barcelona's decades-old “okupa movement” have helped to facilitate the continuation of these dialogues by offering space within dozens of pre-existing squats and even opening new sites to host such interactions. Leveraging decades of experience and skill in re-appropriating spaces, squatters create room …

Interaction Of Sleep And Emotional Content On The Production Of False Memories, Shannon Mckeon, Edward F. Pace-Schott, Rebecca M. C. Spencer

Rebecca M. C. Spencer

Sleep benefits veridical memories, resulting in superior recall relative to off-line intervals spent awake. Sleep also increases false memory recall in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Given the suggestion that emotional veridical memories are prioritized for consolidation over sleep, here we examined whether emotion modulates sleep’s effect on false memory formation. Participants listened to semantically related word lists lacking a critical lure representing each list’s ‘‘gist.’’ Free recall was tested after 12 hours containing sleep or wake. The Sleep group recalled more studied words than the Wake group but only for emotionally neutral lists. False memories of both negative and neutral …

Buying Time: Gendered Patterns In Union Contracts, Dan Clawson, Jillian Crocker

Dan Clawson

As products of negotiations, union contracts provide insight into areas of stress concerning work hours and schedules. Our analysis demonstrates the ways workers in two occupations—nurses and firefighters—use collective bargaining to develop workplace policies that enable them to manage jobs and family. The contracts show significant differences between firefighters and nurses over issues of work scheduling, overtime, and vacations. These differences reflect nurses’ concern with putting boundaries on their work lives in favor of caregiving and firefighters’ concern with bread winning. Nurse contracts specify scheduling rules in detail, heavily restrict mandatory overtime, and outline guidelines for distributing prime time vacations. …

Systemic Bias In Wikipedia : What It Looks Like, And How To Deal With It, Laura Quilter

Laura Quilter

No abstract provided.

Copyright And Fair Use : An Introduction For Faculty, Laura Quilter

Laura Quilter

In this overview of copyright issues for faculty and researchers, we will discuss how copyright affects you: how to protect and get credit for your work, share what you want to share, and use others' work. Special attention will be given to both questions and problems with using other people's work -- relying on fair use, and asking for permission if it's not a fair use -- and the best ways to manage your own copyrights and licenses. Plenty of time for discussion and questions!

Capital Flight From Sub-Saharan African Countries: Updated Estimates, 1970 - 2010, James K. Boyce, Léonce Ndikumana

James K. Boyce

The performance of Sub-Saharan African economies over the past decade has inspired optimism on the region’s prospects. But the region still faces major development challenges, and it is now clear that the majority of its countries will not achieve key millennium development goals.

A key constraint to SSA’s growth and development is the shortage of financing. At the same time, the sub-region is a source of large-scale capital flight, which escalated during last decade even as the region experienced growth acceleration. The group of 33 SSA countries covered by this report has lost a total of $814 billion dollars from …

Comment On Khan, Li And Weisbrot (Thomas Weisskopf Festschrift Conference Paper), James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce

Boyce comments on Shahrukh Khan's " The Military and Economic Development in Pakistan, Minqi Li's "Socialism: The 20th Century and the 21st Century" and Mark Weisbrot's "Economic Growth: The Great Slowdown (1980-2000) and Recovery (2000-2010)." He adds his own thoughts on the theme running through these papers: the need to take the role of the state, both in terms of state control over the means of production and resource allocation, but also about the core issue of control over the state itself. This means engaging, as Khan, Li and Weisbrot do, with the historic struggle to build and sustain real …

Opportunities As Chances: Maximising The Probability That Everybody Succeeds, Marco Mariotti, Roberto Veneziani

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Opportunities in society are commonly interpreted as ‘chances of success’. Within this interpretation, should opportunities be equalised? We show that a liberal principle of justice and a limited principle of social rationality imply that opportunity pro…les should be evaluated by means of a ‘Nash’criterion. The interpretation is new: the social objective should be to maximise the chance that everybody in society succeeds. In particular, the failure of even only one individual must be considered maximally detrimental. We also study a re…nement of this criterion and its extension to problems of intergenerational justice.

Capital Flight From North African Countries, Léonce Ndikumana, James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce

Ndikumana and Boyce demonstrate that, while the countries of North Africa have achieved high levels of development relative to their sister nations south of the Sahara, they too have suffered from financial hemorrhages through capital flight. The burden on their economies is substantial in terms of lost investment and foregone government revenue, with adverse effects on economic growth and social service delivery. The authors provide estimates of the total amount of capital flight from four North African countries: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, from 1970 to 2010.

Umass Amherst Friends Of The Library Newsletter - Fall/Winter 2012 (No. 44), Jay Schafer

Library News for the Friends of the UMass Amherst Libraries

The Story of the $60 Gift

On the following pages, you will see and read about the transformative renovations in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library and the Science & Engineering Library that were completed over the summer. An important part of the story that the photos don’t tell is how these projects have been funded. Unlike major infrastructure improvement projects (including the new elevators and the electrical upgrades), the renovation of interior library space is not directly funded by the state or the campus. The success of the Procrastination Station café over the past several years encouraged our Campus Auxiliary …

Prelude To A Master Plan: Ware, Massachusetts, Belen Alfaro, Bruno Carneiro, Margaret Engesser, Kathryn E. Fox, Evadne R. Friedman, Timothy Inacio, Anita Lockesmith, Christina Mills, Stephanie Molden, Meagen Mulherin, Russell Pandres, Vinicius Pereira, Brian Reid, Pedro Soto, Jennifer Stromsten

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

Prelude to a Master Plan offers ideas, recommendations, and a toolkit to help the town chart its own path towards that future. While the teams and individual students worked to ‘drill down’ into specific topic areas, the Studio defined three basic areas in order to think about how the various assets, challenges and ideas undermine or reinforce one another. The report is loosely organized in those terms: addressing the outlying rural areas and issues specific to these places, considering one of the key growth areas that has extended from town and the conflicts that arise from the many uses occurring …

Nelig Meeting - September 28, 2012, New England Library Instruction Group

New England Library Instruction Group

NELIG quarterly meeting.

Cooling The Planet, Clearing The Air: Climate Policy, Carbon Pricing, And Co-Benefits, James K. Boyce, Manuel Pastor

James K. Boyce

Policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can yield substantial co-benefits via reduced emissions of co-pollutants such as particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and air toxics. Valuation studies suggest that these benefits may be comparable in magnitude to the value of reduced carbon emissions. However, co-pollutant intensity (the ratio of co-benefits to carbon dioxide emissions) varies across pollution sources, and so efficient policy design would seek greater emissions reductions where co-benefits are higher. Moreover, because co-pollutant impacts are localized, the distribution of co-benefits raises important issues of equity, particularly with regard to the unintentional income, racial, and geographic disparities that might result …

Proceedings Of The Oss 2012 Doctoral Consortium, Klaas-Jan Stol, Charles M. Schweik, Imed Hammouda

Charles M. Schweik

Papers accepted (and revised) by doctoral students who participated in the Open Source Systems (OSS) 2012 Doctoral Consortium, Hammamet, Tunisia

Subject Repository Rankings Overview, Rebecca C. Reznik-Zellen, Jessica Adamick

Rebecca C. Reznik-Zellen

Data about subject repository size, governance, age, coverage, etc., was collected in late fall 2009 and early winter 2010 for research on subject repositories.

Why We Need Theories V.2, M.J. Peterson

M.J. Peterson

This is a presentation for incoming college students explaining why they already have theories, introducing the distinction between theories and models, and indicating the characteristics of good theories.

Organic Farming And Rural Transformations In The European Union: A Political Economy Approach, Charalampos Konstantinidis

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the impact of organic farming for achieving the environmental and social objectives of sustainability in Europe over the past 20 years. Organic farming is considered the poster child of rural development in Europe, often seen as a model of the integration of small-scale production with environmental considerations. Since this model runs counter to the logic of developing capitalist structures in agriculture, I revisit the Marxian predictions regarding the "agrarian question". Furthermore, I trace the discursive changes in support of small-scale production in the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and assess whether small farms have improved their situation …

Rebranding Diversity: Colorblind Racism Inside The U.S. Advertising Industry, Christopher Boulton

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines race inequality inside the United States advertising industry. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted at three large agencies in New York City during the summer of 2010 (including ethnographic observations, affinity-based focus groups, in-depth interviews, and open-ended surveys), I argue that the industry's good faith effort to diversify through internship-based affirmative action programs is overwhelmed by the more widespread material practices of closed network hiring--a system that advantages affluent Whites through referral hires, subjective notions of "chemistry" or "fit," and outright nepotism through "must-hires." Furthermore, the discriminatory nature of White affirmative action is hidden from view, masked by …

Organizing Markets: The Structuring Of Neoliberalism In The U.S. Airline Industry, Dustin Robert Avent-Holt

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines the emergence of neoliberalism through an historical analysis of the evolution of the U.S airline industry. In 1938 the basic economic activities of U.S. airlines were placed under the regulatory oversight and control of the Civil Aeronautics Board. This institution of "regulated competition" persisted largely unquestioned until the economic crisis of the 1970s. Out of this crisis the Airline Deregulation Act was passed in 1978, eliminating most of these economic controls. Based on analysis of Congressional hearings, a key industry trade press (Air Transport World), the general business press, and financial and labor market data on the …

The Sources Of Financial Profit: A Theoretical And Empirical Investigation Of The Transformation Of Banking In The Us, Iren G. Levina

Open Access Dissertations

The last thirty years in the US have been characterized by rising financial profits as a share of total profits and the growth of banking activities yielding non-interest income. These developments pose two questions. First, what are the social relations enabling and sustaining financial profits and what are their macroeconomic sources? Second, what do these trends imply for the nature of banking and what kind of theory of banking can capture them? This study addresses these questions and makes four contributions. First, a Marxist theory of banking is developed to capture the transformation of banking drawing on two characteristics: first, …

Roots Of Modality, Aynat Rubinstein

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores the interplay of grammar and context in the interpretation of modal words like ought, necessary, and need. The empirical foci of the discussion are patterns in the use of strong and weak necessity modals in conversation, and the interpretation of syntactically and semantically versatile modals like need in the various grammatical configurations they appear in across languages.

It is argued that a sensitivity to collective commitments in a conversation is necessary for understanding certain aspects of modal strength, in particular the traditional distinction between strong and weak necessity modals (exhibited by must and ought …

The Relationship Between Mass Incarceration And Crime In The Neoliberal Period In The United States, Geert Leo Dhondt

Open Access Dissertations

The United States prison population has grown seven-fold over the past 35 years. This dissertation looks at the impact this growth in incarceration has on crime rates and seeks to understand why this drastic change in public policy happened.

Simultaneity between prison populations and crime rates makes it difficult to isolate the causal effect of changes in prison populations on crime. This dissertation uses marijuana and cocaine mandatory minimum sentencing to break that simultaneity. Using panel data for 50 states over 40 years, this dissertation finds that the marginal addition of a prisoner results in a higher, not lower, crime …

Verbalizing In The Second Language Classroom: The Development Of The Grammatical Concept Of Aspect, Prospero N. Garcia

Open Access Dissertations

Framed within a Sociocultural Theory of Mind (SCT) in the field of Second Language Acquisition (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006), this dissertation explores the role of verbalizing in the internalization of grammatical categories through the use of Concept-based Instruction (henceforth CBI) in the second language (L2) classroom.

Using Vygotsky's (1986) distinction between scientific and spontaneous or everyday concepts applied to L2 development (Negueruela, 2008), this study focuses on the teaching and potential development of the grammatical concept of aspect in the Spanish L2 classroom, and the role of verbalizing in its internalization. It is proposed that verbalizing mediates between the learners' …

Sac Attack: Assessing The Role Of Recollection In The Mirror Effect, Angela M. Pazzaglia

Open Access Dissertations

Low-frequency (LF) words have higher hit rates (HRs) and lower false alarm rates (FARs) than high-frequency (HF) words in recognition memory, a phenomenon termed the mirror effect by Glanzer and Adams (1985). The primary mechanism for producing the mirror effect varies substantially across models of recognition memory, with some models localizing the effects during encoding and others during retrieval. The current experiments contrast two retrieval-stage models, the Source of Activation Confusion (SAC; Reder, Nhouyvanisvong, Schunn, Ayers, Angstadt, & Hiraki, 2000) model and the unequal variance signal detection theory (UVSDT) criterion shift model (e.g., DeCarlo, 2002). The SAC model proposes that …

Money, Reality, And Value: Non-Commodity Money In Marxian Political Economy, Joseph Thomas Rebello

Open Access Dissertations

My dissertation offers an advancement of the Marxian theory of money, motivated by a methodological critique of monetary theory in general. As such, my dissertation is located within the philosophy and methodology of economics and the history of monetary thought, in addition to Marxian political economy. This intermingling of fields reflects both my research interests and my argument with respect to the current state of scholarship on Marx and money. Despite increasing acceptance of the compatibility of non-commodity money and Marxian political economy, a dualist social ontology has stunted attempts to theorize the relationship between money, value, and class. I …

Stress In Harmonic Serialism, Kathryn Ringler Pruitt

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation proposes a model of word stress in a derivational version of Optimality Theory (OT) called Harmonic Serialism (HS; Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004, McCarthy 2000, 2006, 2010a). In this model, the metrical structure of a word is derived through a series of optimizations in which the 'best' metrical foot is chosen according to a ranking of violable constraints. Like OT, HS models cross-linguistic typology under the assumption that every constraint ranking should correspond to an attested language.

Chapter 2 provides an argument for modeling stress typology in HS by showing that the serial model correctly rules out stress patterns …

Essays On Urban Sprawl, Race, And Ethnicity, Jared M. Ragusett

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the economic consequences of urban sprawl for US minorities. Each essay focuses on a key empirical debate related to that relationship. The first essay establishes a set of attributes and empirical measures of sprawl based upon a comprehensive review of the literature. I define sprawl as a multi-faceted pattern of three land-use attributes: low density, deconcentration, and decentralization. I then resolve several methodological inconsistencies in the measurement of sprawl. Extensive analysis of spatial and economic data finds that metropolitan areas do not commonly exhibit high-sprawl (or low-sprawl) features across multiple measures. Instead, they often exhibit unique combinations …

Farm-To-Fork: Understanding Locally-Oriented Farm-To-Vendor Food Systems: Access, Boundaries, And Power-Relations, Shawn Alan Trivette

Open Access Dissertations

Locally oriented food has recently gained considerable popularity as an alternative to the industrial food system. Current scholarship on local food has typically focused on direct-to-consumer (DTC) arrangements, such as farmers' markets or CSAs. Yet other players besides producers and consumers engage with locally-oriented food. Food vendors (restaurants, retailers and grocers, and value-added food processors) have recently entered the scene and locally-oriented farm-to-vendor arrangements constitute one of the cutting edges of the development of local food systems. This dissertation studies one such local food system in southern New England. Utilizing a mixed methods approach entailing social network analysis, in-depth interviews, …