Intersections of Place, Time, and Entertainment in Rural Nebraska in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

As newcomers developed Nebraska settlements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they began to shape the space. This study explores the intersections of place, time, and entertainment in rural Nebraska from the beginning of European American settlement in the late 19th century to the end of the Great Depression. Through such examinations, we can better understand the historical geographies of individual and collective human experience. With such knowledge, we can then recognize how entertainment reflected social life, sense of place, place attachment, and the intricacies and larger scale trends of race, ethnicity, gender, age, class, nationality, and religion. In this work, a variety of sources are mined and examined through primarily qualitative methods. The acknowledgment that research is subjective and selective is present in researching, writing, and producing the narrative. Literature from a variety of disciplines informs the research. Such a study adds to scholarship by incorporating contemporary approaches, methodologies, and theories, such as humanistic, post-modern, feminist, and post-colonial, to the geographic case study approach that has been criticized for being too descriptive and lacking theory. Each chapter contains an examination of leisure activities. Chapter 1, entitled “Everyday Leisure Activities,” explores a wide variety of common entertainments available to people living in and visiting rural Nebraska. The rest of the study examines specific activities via case studies. The Walter Savidge Amusement Company in the early 20th century is the heart of Chapter 2, “Traveling Shows.” Chapter 3, “Ethnic- Religious Entertainment: The German Russian Mennonites of Henderson” demonstrates how leisure activities could vary from the mainstream depending upon a group’s ethnic, national, and religious characteristics. Chapters 4 and 5 explore the state’s amusement parks in the early 20th century by discovering the personality of The Long Pine Amusement Park during its first eight years. The last section, “The Broader Context,” sifts out themes of race, ethnicity, gender, class, age, nationality, and religion, illustrating how they were manifested in entertainment. Adviser: David J. Wishar

Advanced Strain-Isolation-Pad Material with Bonded Fibrous Construction

The feasibility of utilizing air lay and liquid lay felt deposition techniques to fabricate strain isolation pad (SIP) materials for the Space Shuttle Orbiter was demonstrated. These materials were developed as candidate replacements for the present needled felt SIP used between the ceramic tiles and the aluminum skin on the undersurface of the Orbiter. The SIP materials that were developed consisted of high temperature aramid fibers deposited by controlled fluid (air or liquid) carriers to form low density unbonded felts. The deposited felts were then bonded at the fiber intersections with a small amount of high temperature polyimide resin. This type of bonded felt construction can potentially eliminate two of the problems associated with the present SIP, viz., transmittal of localized stresses into the tiles and load history dependent mechanical response. However, further work is needed to achieve adequate through thickness tensile strength in the bonded felts

The importance of the classical channel in the impurity transport of optimized stellarators

In toroidal magnetic confinement devices, such as tokamaks and stellarators, neoclassical transport is usually an order of magnitude larger than its classical counterpart. However, when a high-collisionality species is present in a stellarator optimized for low Pfirsch-Schl\"uter current, its classical transport can be comparable to the neoclassical transport. In this letter, we compare neoclassical and classical fluxes and transport coefficients calculated for Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) and Large Helical Device (LHD) cases. In W7-X, we find that the classical transport of a collisional impurity is comparable to the neoclassical transport for all radii, while it is negligible in the LHD cases, except in the vicinity of radii where the neoclassical transport changes sign. In the LHD case, electrostatic potential variations on the flux-surface significantly enhance the neoclassical impurity transport, while the classical transport is largely insensitive to this effect in the cases studied.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

Under New Management: Share Ownership and the Growth of UK Asset Manager Capitalism

Over the past several decades, asset management firms – financial intermediaries who invest assets on behalf of ultimate beneficiaries such as pension holders or wealthy individuals – have surged to become the dominant shareholders in corporations throughout the global economy, supplanting individuals and other institutional investors such as pension funds. This growth has been accompanied by a second trend: significant concentration within asset management itself. BlackRock and Vanguard, the two largest asset managers worldwide, control $9 trillion and$8 trillion in assets, respectively – or more than four times the value of all UK corporations. We argue the emerging dominance of asset managers constitutes a new corporate governance regime, a clear understanding of which is vital to addressing corporations’ roles in societal challenges from the climate crisis to wage stagnation and inequality. This new regime – asset manager capitalism - is the product of two related trends in ownership without historical precedent: the combination of significant reconcentration of ownership within a small top cohort of minority shareholders, and the universal nature of these shareholders, meaning their ownership of assets is distributed across all geographies and industries. In contrast to the image of the activist shareholder, on which the prevailing ‘shareholder primacy’ regime of corporate governance is based, asset manager capitalism is defined by a structure of ownership in which the dominant owners of a corporation are motivated not by the performance of individual portfolio companies, but by the accumulation of further assets under management. In the US, the rise of the asset management industry and increasing domination of ownership by elite asset management firms of corporate shares, bonds, and numerous other asset classes is well documented. In the UK, this transition is less well documented. To address this gap, we analysed shareholding data in the FTSE350 index of UK companies from the end of 2000 to the end of 2020, assessing trends in ownership distribution as well as corresponding shifts in corporate behaviour. We found that although the total share of FTSE350 value controlled by the 10 largest investors remained relatively stable at approximately 20% over this period, concentration within the Top 10 became substantially more pronounced, with BlackRock and Vanguard now controlling 10%. At the level of individual firms, we found a substantial upward trend with respect to the fraction of shares outstanding held by the top 10 investors in a given firm. With respect to corporate behaviour over this period, our analysis found that while productive investment had declined, shareholder payouts as a proportion of profits had risen substantially, reaching nearly 80% of pre-tax profits at the end of 2020. These results suggest the UK is following the US in the solidification of an economy defined by asset manager capitalism, with implications for policymakers and others concerned with corporations’ roles in inequality, productivity and sustainability.Executive Summary 1 Introduction 2 Corporate ownership: The last 100 years 2.1 Institutionalization 1.0: Dispersion 2.2 Institutionalization 2.0: Internationalization and Reconcentration 3 Asset manager capitalism as corporate governance regime 4 Zooming in: The top of the shareholder crop 4.1 The age of the asset manager 4.2 The Rise of the Big 10 5 Corporate governance under asset manager capitalism: what do asset managers want? 6 Conclusions and Recommendations 6.1 What’s the purpose of shareholders, anyway? 6.2 Cutting out the middleman? Alternative models of ownershi

Subcentimeter depth resolution using a single-photon counting time-of-flight laser ranging system at 1550 nm wavelength

We demonstrate subcentimeter depth profiling at a stand off distance of 330m using a time-of-flight approach based on time-correlated single-photon counting. For the first time to our knowledge, the photon-counting time-of-flight technique was demonstrated at a wavelength of 1550nm using a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector. The performance achieved suggests that a system using superconducting detectors has the potential for low-light-level and eye-safe operation. The system’s instrumental response was 70ps full width at half-maximum, which meant that 1cm surface-to-surface resolution could be achieved by locating the centroids of each return signal. A depth resolution of 4mm was achieved by employing an optimized signal-processing algorithm based on a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo method

Disruption of the Serotonergic System after Neonatal Hypoxia-Ischemia in a Rodent Model

Identifying which specific neuronal phenotypes are vulnerable to neonatal hypoxia-ischemia, where in the brain they are damaged, and the mechanisms that produce neuronal losses are critical to determine the anatomical substrates responsible for neurological impairments in hypoxic-ischemic brain-injured neonates. Here we describe our current work investigating how the serotonergic network in the brain is disrupted in a rodent model of preterm hypoxia-ischemia. One week after postnatal day 3 hypoxia-ischemia, losses of serotonergic raphé neurons, reductions in serotonin levels in the brain, and reduced serotonin transporter expression are evident. These changes can be prevented using two anti-inflammatory interventions; the postinsult administration of minocycline or ibuprofen. However, each drug has its own limitations and benefits for use in neonates to stem damage to the serotonergic network after hypoxia-ischemia. By understanding the fundamental mechanisms underpinning hypoxia-ischemia-induced serotonergic damage we will hopefully move closer to developing a successful clinical intervention to treat neonatal brain injury

Eating Biodiversity: Investigating the Links Between Grassland Biodiversity and Quality Food Production

Modern food production systems are generally detrimental to biodiversity, and the widespread loss of species-diverse grassland as a consequence of intensive farming methods is well documented. Since the 1980s, a range of policy measures and financial incentives for farmers have been introduced in Europe to halt (and in some cases, reverse) this trend, primarily to meet environmental objectives of species and habitat conservation and landscape protection. Biodiversity, where associated with agricultural production, has largely been regarded as a positive \u27externality\u27 to the process of food production; a ‘product’ which benefits wider society without necessarily conferring an agricultural benefit to the producer. However, with increasing emphasis on food quality, and the marketing of food products by geographical origin, method of production, gastronomic value and nutritional and health properties, there is potential to improve financial returns for farmers and the wider rural economy. Production in which grassland biodiversity is an ‘input’ to the livestock production food chain are embedded in some speciality systems, notably in mountain areas of Europe (Peeters and Frame, 2002). In the context of conserving grassland biodiversity there is a need to improve our understanding of the links between food products and animal diets, including pasture composition. This paper outlines a 3-year project funded by the UK RELU programme (RELU, 2005) which commenced in 2005. Results are not yet available so this summary focuses on the strategy being followed and the wider implications of linking enhanced food-product value to biodiversity

ICLF in cooperative systems: a strategy to achieve net positive environmental and socioeconomic budgets.

ICLF systems are suitable for cooperative designs that gather small and large farmers. We use an agricultural cooperative in Mato Grosso do Sul state as an example of ICLF INCLUDING SWINE to produce a model of nutrients recycling, stormwater recovery and renewable energy production (eletric power). Based on pilot farms studies, in this presentation we show that the upscaling of these technologies to the entire cooperative level can improve environmental and socioeconomic indicators

Character N-Grams for Detecting Deceptive Controversial Opinions

[EN] Controversial topics are present in the everyday life, and opinions about them can be either truthful or deceptive. Deceptive opinions are emitted to mislead other people in order to gain some advantage. In the most of the cases humans cannot detect whether the opinion is deceptive or truthful, however, computational approaches have been used successfully for this purpose. In this work, we evaluate a representation based on character n-grams features for detecting deceptive opinions. We consider opinions on the following: abortion, death penalty and personal feelings about the best friend; three domains studied in the state of the art. We found character n-grams effective for detecting deception in these controversial domains, even more than using psycholinguistic features. Our results indicate that this representation is able to capture relevant information about style and content useful for this task. This fact allows us to conclude that the proposed one is a competitive text representation with a good trade-off between simplicity and performance.We would like to thank CONACyT for partially supporting this work under grants 613411, CB-2015-01-257383, and FC-2016/2410. The work of the last author was partially funded by the Spanish MINECO under the research project SomEMBED (TIN2015-71147-C2-1-P).Sánchez-Junquera, JJ.; Luis Villaseñor Pineda; Montes Gomez, M.; Rosso, P. (2018). Character N-Grams for Detecting Deceptive Controversial Opinions. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 11018:135-140. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98932-7_13S13514011018Aritsugi, M., et al.: Combining word and character n-grams for detecting deceptive opinions, vol. 1, pp. 828–833. IEEE (2017)Buller, D.B., Burgoon, J.K.: Interpersonal deception theory. Commun. Theory 6(3), 203–242 (1996)Cagnina, L.C., Rosso, P.: Detecting deceptive opinions: intra and cross-domain classification using an efficient representation. Int. J. Uncertainty Fuzziness Knowl. Based Syst. 25(Suppl. 2), 151–174 (2017)Feng, S., Banerjee, R., Choi, Y.: Syntactic stylometry for deception detection, pp. 171–175. Association for Computational Linguistics (2012)Fusilier, D.H., Montes-y-Gómez, M., Rosso, P., Cabrera, R.G.: Detection of opinion spam with character n-grams. In: Gelbukh, A. (ed.) CICLing 2015. LNCS, vol. 9042, pp. 285–294. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18117-2_21Hernández-Castañeda, Á., Calvo, H., Gelbukh, A., Flores, J.J.G.: Cross-domain deception detection using support vector networks. Soft Comput. 21(3), 1–11 (2016)Mihalcea, R., Strapparava, C.: The lie detector: explorations in the automatic recognition of deceptive language. In: Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers, pp. 309–312. Association for Computational Linguistics (2009)Ott, M., Choi, Y., Cardie, C., Hancock, J.T.: Finding deceptive opinion spam by any stretch of the imagination. In: Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies-Volume 1, pp. 309–319. Association for Computational Linguistics (2011)Pérez-Rosas, V., Mihalcea, R.: Cross-cultural deception detection. In: Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), vol. 2, pp. 440–445 (2014)Sapkota, U., Solorio, T., Montes-y-Gómez, M., Bethard, S.: Not all character n-grams are created equal: a study in authorship attribution. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 93–102 (2015)Vrij, A.: Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities. Wiley, Hoboken (2008