Their Sleep Is To Be Desecrated : California\u27s Central Valley Project and the Wintu People of Northern California, 1938- 1943

The morning of July 14, 1944, was intended to be a moment of celebration for the City of Redding, California. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes had been scheduled to arrive in the booming city to dedicate Shasta Dam, a national reclamation project of great pride to local citizens and construction workers. Just days prior, however, the dedication ceremony had been canceled due to the inability of Ickes to leave Washington D.C.. Instead, a small group of U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) officials, Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) officials, and local city officials quietly gathered within the dam\u27s $19,400,000 power plant. A BOR official flipped a switch to start one of the plant\u27s two massive generators, sending a surge of 120,000 watts of hydroelectricity into California\u27s transmission lines and the Pacific, Gas, and Electric (PG&E) distribution system. This energy would fuel the West\u27s war industries and the federal defense effort in World War II. Though without fanfare, the switching event signaled the official start of commercial production of power from the world\u27s second largest dam and keystone of the Central Valley Project (CVP). From Washington, D.C., the event was heralded by BOR Commissioner Harry W. Bashore as a milestone in the fulfillment of visions Californians have had for nearly 100 years.

Housing Wealth and Retirement Timing

We use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Office of Housing Enterprise Oversight to measure the effect of changes in housing wealth on retirement timing. Using cross-MSA variation in house-price movements to identify wealth effects on retirement timing, we find evidence that such wealth effects are present. According to some specifications the rate of transition into retirement increases in the presence of positive housing wealth shocks. In addition, we use data on expected age of retirement to measure the impact of housing wealth shocks on expectations about retirement timing. Using renters as a control for heterogeneity in local amenities and using individual fixed effects to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we find that a 10% increase in housing wealth is associated with a reduction in expected retirement age of between 3.5 and 5 months.

Mapping Tutorial Interactions: A Report on Results and Implications

At the University of Rhode Island (URI), we believe that assessment of writing center interactions can be useful beyond conventional efforts to measure the effects and effectiveness of tutoring strategies in sessions with student writers. In fact, we believe that assessment may be useful for developing knowledge about tutoring interactions in ways far more general but no less applicable to our field. Elsewhere, we have argued that engaging groups of tutors in assessment of tutoring strategies can yield multiple benefits for writing centers as organizations, such as establishing a writing center as a center for research in the University and fostering the disciplinary knowledge of tutors (Siegel Finer, White-Farnham, and Dyehouse). As a second step in reporting on a multi-year writing center research project, this article shares some results using a new instrument for assessment: tutorial interaction maps. We offer our model of assessment as one that shows promise for facilitating tutors’ understanding and discovery of the work that happens in writing centers, and we suggest that such a model might form a basis for new kinds of tools for use in writing center assessment.University Writing Cente

Development of a micrometeoroid accelerator Final report

Design and performance of arc plasma micrometeoroid accelerator system

Organization of the Devils Hole Workshop

The Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies (HRC) at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) was tasked to organize the Devils Hole Workshop in Furnace Creek Death Valley, CA on May 21 – 23, 2003. This Conference is designed to report current research results and to bring the scientific community, as well as the general public, up to date on research relevant to the Death Valley Regional Flow System (DVRFS). The Devils Hole Workshop is beneficial to the DOE because it provides the opportunity to DOE technical task leaders and Bechtel SAIC (BSC) representatives to present the research currently in progress to a wide audience. Project scientists and other interested parties are also given the opportunity to learn about ongoing hydrologic work by other Project scientists and also federal, state, local, and privately funded entities operating in the DVRFS area. Coordination of this workshop was also beneficial to the University. The university, as an educational facility, was given an exceptional opportunity to mentor a group of students in the many areas involved in this task. Registration, distribution of information, design / updating of the website, and other miscellaneous tasks were performed by Stephanie Gayvert (an undergraduate student), the field trip was coordinated by Amanda Brandt (a graduate student), the abstracts and programs were assembled by Julie Bertoia (a graduate student), and the evaluation forms were summarized and graphed by Roselynn Gentles (an undergraduate student) . In addition, most of these students, along with another graduate student, Jeremy Koonce, had the opportunity to moderate sessions during the workshop. These students performed these tasks admirably and in return gained significant experience in an important area of scientific communication. This task also funded the travel expenses for several UNLV graduate students thus giving them the opportunity to present their research and network with project scientists. This final report summarizes the tasks performed, the dates completed, and the people that assisted. In addition, a summary of the results of the evaluation forms returned by attendees will be presented. One goal of this report is to assist the organizers for the 2004 Devils Hole workshop with lessons learned by the HRC. This report will also serve to recognize the efforts of several people within the HRC, the National Park Service (NPS), and the US Geological Survey (USGS) that assisted with this task. The success of this workshop was largely due to the efforts of these people

Unlocking the Pragmatics of Emoji: Evaluation of the Integration of Pragmatic Markers for Sarcasm Detection

Emojis have become an integral element of online communications, serving as a powerful, under-utilised resource for enhancing pragmatic understanding in NLP. Previous works have highlighted their potential for improvement of more complex tasks such as the identification of figurative literary devices including sarcasm due to their role in conveying tone within text. However present state-of-the-art does not include the consideration of emoji or adequately address sarcastic markers such as sentiment incongruence. This work aims to integrate these concepts to generate more robust solutions for sarcasm detection leveraging enhanced pragmatic features from both emoji and text tokens. This was achieved by establishing methodologies for sentiment feature extraction from emojis and a depth statistical evaluation of the features which characterise sarcastic text on Twitter. Current convention for generation of training data which implements weak-labelling using hashtags or keywords was evaluated against a human-annotated baseline; postulated validity concerns were verified where statistical evaluation found the content features deviated significantly from the baseline, highlighting potential validity concerns for many prominent works on the topic to date. Organic labelled sarcastic tweets containing emojis were crowd sourced by means of a survey to ensure valid outcomes for the sarcasm detection model. Given an established importance of both semantic and sentiment information, a novel sentiment-aware attention mechanism was constructed to enhance pattern recognition, balancing core features of sarcastic text: sentiment incongruence and context. This work establishes a framework for emoji feature extraction; a key roadblock cited in literature for their use in NLP tasks. The proposed sarcasm detection pipeline successfully facilitates the task using a GRU neural network with sentiment-aware attention, at an accuracy of 73% and promising indications regarding model robustness as part of a framework which is easily scalable for the inclusion of any future emojis released. Both enhanced sentiment information to supplement context in addition to consideration of the emoji were found to improve outcomes for the task

The relationship of the art supervisor in a public school system to the superintendent, to the principals, to the teachers, and to the pupils

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit