Words and deeds: electoral success for Greens in the US leads to less environmental sabotage

Does extremism necessarily beget violence? Benjamin Farrer and Graig R. Klein compare the electoral success of the US Green Party with rates of environmental sabotage. They found that when Greens won seats at local and state level, sabotage declined. Voters also appeared to punish candidates for violence carried out by environmental campaigners. Extreme words and extreme deeds might seem to ..

The Redemption of Cain in John Gardner\u27s \u3ci\u3eGrendel\u3c/i\u3e

Examines Gardner’s Grendel in terms of the clash of the title character’s world-view versus that of the Men in the story. Pays particular attention to Grendel’s position as a descendant of Cain

Nitrogen Application Timing and Cereal Rye (\u3cem\u3eSecale Cereale\u3c/em\u3e L.) Cover Crop Influence Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Dryland contributions to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are increased by N fertilizer applications and high soil water contents. Fertilizer timing and spring growth of cover crops prior to cash crop planting were investigated in separate studies to examine impacts on overall GHG emissions using a near continuous measurement system. There was a significant interaction between N fertilizer rate (0 vs. 224 kg N ha-1 surface-applied as urea) and application date (p= 0.01) for CO2 emissions. This interaction occurred because N fertilizer increased CO2 emissions by 35% for the 21 d interval following early spring application. When application was delayed until mid-spring, the opposite response occurred, and N fertilizer application reduced CO2 emissions by 19% (p=0.06). CO2 and non-CO2 emissions (N2O plus CH4) were analyzed separately in this study because previous research demonstrated that C addition from crop residues can offset CO2 emissions at this location. The soil was a CH4 sink for all six application dates, but atmospheric CH4 consumption was 85% greater during spring and early summer [averaging -85.8 g CO2e (ha×h)-1] than during fall/early winter [averaging -46.3 g CO2e (ha×h)-1]. The soil consumed CH4 at a rate to offset N2O emissions by 9.6% during midspring and early summer when N fertilizer wasn’t applied and by 3.1% when N fertilizer was applied. Dormant-seeded cereal rye (Secale cereale L.) produced an average of 445 kg biomass ha-1 during the first three weeks of spring growth, which is normally prior to corn (Zea mays L.) emergence. The cover crop reduced N2O emissions by 53% and did not increase CO2 emissions. However, since N2O emissions only made up 4% of total GHG emissions, the cover crop only reduced total GHG emissions by 2%. These results indicate that early spring in eastern South Dakota climates may be a key time to target mitigation strategies for soil GHG emissions in a corn and soybean production system. Delaying N fertilizer application from early spring to mid-spring has more potential to reduce these emissions (26% reduction) than growing a cereal rye cover crop that is terminated just prior to corn planting (2% reduction)

Sustainable Revenue Generation System for Nonprofit Institutions of Higher Education

Social and individual spending on higher education has outpaced social and individual economic growth, resulting in nonprofit institutions of higher education (NIHEs) growing increasingly dependent upon unsustainable governmental subsidies and tuition increases. The purpose of this study was to examine the interactions among components of the nonprofit university system, existing revenue generation methods, and sustainability of revenue generation, thereby generating a new sustainable revenue theory for nonprofit universities within the United States. This qualitative grounded theory study used a multiphase design incorporating data from the literature review, historical documents, and phone interviews from a theoretical sampling of 10 NIHEs. Participants were 20 faculty, 40 students, 40 administrative staff, and 20 members of the business community. Analysis included open, focused, axial, and theoretical coding. The study\u27s findings theorize that a sustainable revenue generation system must continually include, and respond to, the multidirectional interactions of all system components as they change over time, including businesses. The result of the multidirectional connectivity between all of the system components was increased revenue for NIHEs and reduced student and government-funded tuition. Additionally, an organizational culture that is incongruent with change has been identified in NIHEs and must be mitigated. The findings of this study could positively affect NIHEs by providing a sustainable and adaptable system for improving revenue generation while increasing affordability and accessibility for students of these institutions, which, in turn, may produce positive social change

TikTok Data Puller

Tiktok’s research API allows users to send HTTP requests to TikTok and receive responses as JSON data. These HTTP requests can be tedious to write and send, as well as the response data being raw and unorganized. This project consists of a python program that works with Tiktok’s research API. It provides an easy to use interface that takes simple information about the data the user wants, and then generates and runs the HTTP requests. It then automatically downloads the JSON Response data cleaned up and ready to use for research

Confidence Inference in Defensive Cyber Operator Decision Making

Cyber defense analysts face the challenge of validating machine generated alerts regarding network-based security threats. Operations tempo and systematic manpower issues have increased the importance of these individual analyst decisions, since they typically are not reviewed or changed. Analysts may not always be confident in their decisions. If confidence can be accurately assessed, then analyst decisions made under low confidence can be independently reviewed and analysts can be offered decision assistance or additional training. This work investigates the utility of using neurophysiological and behavioral correlates of decision confidence to train machine learning models to infer confidence in analyst decisions. Electroencephalography (EEG) and behavioral data was collected from eight participants in a two-task human-subject experiment and used to fit several popular classifiers. Results suggest that for simple decisions, it is possible to classify analyst decision confidence using EEG signals. However, more work is required to evaluate the utility of EEG signals for classification of decision confidence in complex decisions

Labor Unions and Economic Inequality in the Wealthy Democracies

Previous research on the determinants of economic inequality in the wealthy democracies has found that differences in the size and constitution of labor unions accounts for much of the cross-national and over time variation in economic inequality. Despite numerous theoretical and empirical reasons to suppose the contrary, most of this research assumes that the union effect on economic inequality is independent of the particular socio-economic and political environment unions are situated within and the types of workers actually unionized. The broad purpose of this dissertation is to push back against these assumptions and examine whether the union effect on economic inequality is conditioned by certain factors external and internal to unions. This is done through consideration of the four processes by which unions impact economic inequality; which I label the employer, intra-union, insider, and political mechanisms. In particular, I argue that the level of unionization conditions the political mechanism by providing (dis)incentives for parties of the left and right to respond to union member preferences for government action to reduce economic inequalities (chapter 2); that increasing exposure to the world economy conditions the employer, intra-union, and insider mechanisms by reducing the ability and willingness of lower-paid union workers to extract wage gains from their employers (chapter 3); and that market institution and welfare state regimes indirectly condition the employer, intra-union, and insider mechanisms for female and male union workers by generating particular forms and levels of vertical gender occupational segregation within unions (chapter 4). The empirical analyses focus on between 8 and 16 wealthy democracies (depending on data availability) over the final decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. The evidence presented suggests that we cannot understand the totality of the union effect on economic inequality - or on any other socio-economic outcome - without considering each of the four mechanisms by which unions impact economic inequality, the many and varied ways these mechanisms are expressed, and how these mechanisms interact within particular contexts