Blog Consumption and International Relations

International relations professors have sought to incorporate current events into their curriculum through various mechanisms. A traditional way to incorporate the news into the classroom is to have students either subscribe and read a particular newspaper, or watch the nightly news, and hold them responsible for that information. However, with the growing body of professional political science blogs available to the general public, we now have access to immediate current event updates framed through the lens of political science. This manuscript tests to see if having students regularly read professional political science blogs increases student achievement on multiple choice exams when compared to students that were not following blogs in introductory to international relations courses. While controlling for other factors, the regression models demonstrate a 5% increase in performance on later exams by blog-consuming students over those who were not required to read blog posts. These results indicate that, in addition to other factors, there are pedagogical reasons to encourage (rather than prohibit) political science scholars from blogging

The Influence of Regional Power Distributions on Interdependence

Political economy debates about the influence of power configurations in expanding and maintaining global liberalization ebb and flow with the wax and wane of the concentration of power in the international system. This article engages the debate in a novel way from previous scholarship. Employing a series of econometric models that account for regional power, I argue that the global power concentration is ill fit to be the primary predictor of trade liberalization, but instead, regional power fluctuations can dampen and enhance global trends. By incorporating sub-systemic power configurations, we gain a better understanding of the regional variation in states buying into or cashing out of interdependence

Hydrologic and geomorphic assessment of Ebey\u27s Prairie, Central Whidbey Island, Washington

Ebey\u27s Prairie, Washington, was once bisected by a broad riparian corridor consisting of waterlogged soils, swampy areas, seasonal ponds, and intermittent flows, which helped recharge the local aquifer. By the mid-1900s, agriculture drainage tiles, drainage ditches, and fill were being installed by landowners to increase tillable acreage. The extent and location of these drainage tiles or the effects these tiles have had on surface water and subsequently on aquifer recharge in the area remains uncertain. In this study, I characterized the modern and historic surface hydrologic conditions of Ebey\u27s Prairie and their relationship to the local geomorphology. I used the Distributed Hydrology-Soil-Vegetation Model (DHSVM) to reconstruct the pre-agricultural surface hydrology and evaluate the effects agricultural drainage tiles have had on surface hydrologic conditions and aquifer recharge. A model representing Ebey\u27s Prairie watershed with was created, calibrated, and validated to stream discharge measured during my study. A second model was created to represent Ebey\u27s Prairie watershed without drainage tiles. Simulations for water years 2001-2010 for each basin condition were executed and compared to quantify the influence of drainage tiles on hydrologic regimes. Additionally, I mapped the local geomorphology, relating landforms to hydrologic regimes, and used lake sediment coring to improve the understanding of the sequence of events that created the unique landscape and its paleo-environment. Average annual surface discharge for Ebey\u27s Prairie watershed increased by 41,540 m3 (10.97 million gal.) when artificial drainage was present in the model, an increase of 163 percent over the pre-disturbance basin. The general shape of hydrographs was similar for both watersheds; however the basin with drainage tiles typically had peak flows 2-3 times larger than the basin without tiles, in addition to greater hourly baseflows and a longer recessional curve. Average recharge for the entire Ebey\u27s Prairie watershed with drainage tiles was 19.9 cm/yr. and without tiles was 20.3 cm/yr., an increase in recharge of 41,420 m3 or 1.65 percent, which is within the margin of error for the model. It was determined that the effective drainage area of the Ebey\u27s Prairie watershed was smaller than the watershed boundaries as delineated by DHSVM. The effective drainage area largely contained both the silty loam and loam soils or in the silty loam soil only. The silty loam is coincident with the majority of the drainage tiles network and two closed depressions identified as relict marshes. The distribution of an additional 41,418 m3 of recharge across a smaller effective drainage area would result in an increase of between 1.0 to 9.8 cm/yr., which is significant. A geomorphic map of Ebey\u27s Landing National Historical Reserve was created, identifying 20 distinct landforms covering an area of 72.7 km2. Eighty-six percent of the map area is composed of four map units: glaciated uplands, ice-marginal deltas, marine terrace and kame-kettle topography. Two sediment cores, 6.64 m and 9.24 m long, were collected from the Lake Pondilla kettle pond. I attempted to numerically date sediments deposited after kettle collapse to constrain the timing of events associated with the formation of the local geomorphology. Lack of extension rods during coring prevented recovery of deeper sediments. The recovered cores indicated a rapid sedimentation of 1.26 - 1.37 mm/yr through the mid and late-Holocene. A tephra at 7.81 m could not be identified based on chemical analysis, however it is likely Mazama ash based on thickness, character and position within the sediment sequence

A Method for Hemispherical Ground Based Remote Sensing of Urban Surface Temperatures

This thesis presents a method for deriving time-continuous urban surface temperature and heat island assessments from hemispherical ground-based measurements of upwelling thermal radiation. The method, developed to overcome geometric and temporal biases inherent in traditional thermal remote sensing of urban surface climates, uses a sensor view model in conjunction with a radiative transfer code to derive atmospherically corrected, hemispherical radiometric urban surface temperatures. These are used to derive two long-term climatologies of surface urban heat island (sUHI) magnitudes for Basel, Switzerland and Vancouver, Canada. sUHI development shows significant variation based on time-of-day, season, and ambient and synoptic conditions. Results also show large differences in remote sensed sUHI from hemispherical, nadir and complete representations of the urban surface, with a nadir view overestimating seasonal sUHImax from a complete view by nearly a factor of two. In contrast, a hemispherical view provides significantly more representative, time-continuous urban surface temperature and sUHI analysis

Putting Our Best Boots Forward: US Military Deployments and Host-Country Crime

The deployment of military forces abroad has been a major component of the US’s grand strategy since the beginning of the Cold War. However, some scholars have argued that the presence of US military personnel abroad creates a series of negative externalities afflicting local communities. We put some of these claims to the test by looking at the effect of US military deployments on crime rates in the host-state. Using cross-national crime statistics from the United Nations and data on US troop deployments, we examine whether US military deployments are associated with higher levels of criminal activity across a large subset of crimes. In aggregate, the mere presence of troops does not increase the criminal activity in a state; however, there is a conditional effect when we account for a difference in culture between the host-state and the US; the presence of foreign deployed troops is associated with higher levels of property-related crimes in a country. Consequently, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the impact that US military deployments, and US foreign policy more broadly, have had on other countries, and also enhances our understanding of the micro-level factors that might affect relationships between alliance partners

Towards a Community Framework for Agent-Based Modelling

Agent-based modelling has become an increasingly important tool for scholars studying social and social-ecological systems, but there are no community standards on describing, implementing, testing and teaching these tools. This paper reports on the establishment of the Open Agent-Based Modelling Consortium, www.openabm.org, a community effort to foster the agent-based modelling development, communication, and dissemination for research, practice and education.Replication, Documentation Protocol, Software Development, Standardization, Test Beds, Education, Primitives