Crop Depredations by Canada Geese in East-Central Wisconsin

In 1973, I presented a paper on Waterfowl Crop Damage in Wisconsin at the 6th Bird Control Seminar at Bowling Green, Ohio (Hunt & Bell 1983). That paper reviewed crop damage by Canada geese (Branta canadensis) around Horicon National Wildlife Refuge and the program developed to pay for and control damage, and suggested some recommendations related to future depredations management. At that time the fall goose population was about 200,000 at peak levels on the refuge. Since 1973, some significant changes were implemented in the Horicon area that reduced the peak concentration to less than 100,000. Crop depredations by geese, however, have remained a chronic problem and the goose management program has become a controversial issue throughout the Mississippi Flyway. The purpose of this paper is to review events since the 1972 season in relation to crop dam-ages and to describe our new damage law payment system. Field data for this paper were generously provided by state and federal personnel working on crop depredations, and financial records were obtained from staff in the Central Files section of the Madison office

Deinstitutionalization through Business Model Evolution: Women Entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa

This chapter is among the first to examine the interplay between deinstitutionalization and the rollout of novel business models by women entrepreneurs in developing countries. Much of the existing literature has examined the ways in which policy directives by formal institutions are the key drivers of entrepreneurial activity among women. Implicitly, this orientation suggests that the fate of women entrepreneurs is tied to, and cascades from, macro-level deinstitutionalization efforts, arising through changes in policies, laws and regulations championed at the highest levels. While this top-down view may intuitively be attractive, there are empirical reasons to doubt that the “institutional cascading” model accurately captures the underlying mechanisms of entrepreneurial activity among women. Taking a radically different tack, we develop and test an alternative, market-based perspective in which novel business models developed by women drive deinstitutionalization in bottom-up fashion. The context for our study involves detailed case histories of 95 women who started new businesses in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 1960–2012. Using a question-driven research design, our findings indicate that deinstitutionalization is strongly associated with the timing and substance of entrepreneurial action taken by MENA women

Reassessing the Practical and Theoretical Influence of Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition

This paper presents a long overdue reassessment of entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA). Traditionally considered simply a niche occurrence of small company leveraged buyouts (LBO), ETA is actually a meaningful contributor to a nation’s entrepreneurial capacity and business revitalization. Scholarly understanding of ETA has been severely limited by three factors: the paucity of data related to entrepreneurial acquisitions, the tendency to equate entrepreneurship primarily with new venture creation, and the reliance upon explanatory models for buyouts that are grounded in narrowly conceived notions of 1980s-era, large-scale, hyper-leveraged LBOs. Prior efforts to conceptualize all buyouts based on the large LBO model and through the lens of agency theory have severely restricted the ability of scholars to look past the buyout model motivated by financial reengineering gains to see instead the entrepreneurial aims and outcomes often associated with buyouts, particularly ETA. In order to situate ETA more fruitfully in the domain of entrepreneurship finance, we take issue with the conventional agency theory framing and offer instead an explanatory model for ETA involving entrepreneurial intent and novel financing. To overcome the data scarcity problems and to bring the characteristics of ETA into sharper relief, we present testable propositions side-by-side with data from search funds, a specific ETA investment vehicle that substantively replicates the entrepreneurial intents and outcomes of ETA. By examining the theoretical streams of LBO and entrepreneurship finance in practical context of search funds, we build a more coherent conceptualization of ETA

Theology, News and Notes - Vol. 35, No. 02

Theology News & Notes was a theological journal published by Fuller Theological Seminary from 1954 through 2014.https://digitalcommons.fuller.edu/tnn/1100/thumbnail.jp

Concreteness and word production

Two experiments are reported that investigated the effect of concreteness on the ability to generate words to fit sentence contexts. When participants attempted to retrieve words from dictionary definitions in Experiment 1, abstract words were associated with more omissions and more alternates than were concrete words. These findings are consistent with the view that the semantic-lexical weights in the word production system are weaker for abstract than for concrete words. We found no evidence that greater competition from semantic neighbors was an additional reason why abstract words were harder to produce. Participants also reported more positive tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) when attempting to produce abstract words from their definitions, consistent with more phonological retrieval problems for abstract than for concrete words. In Experiment 2, participants attempted to generate words to fit into a sentence that described a specific event. The difference between the numbers of abstract and concrete words recalled was significantly smaller in the event condition than in the definition condition, and evidence no longer emerged of greater phonological retrieval failure for abstract words. Overall, the results are consistent with the view that the semantic-lexical weights, but not the lexical-phonological weights, are weaker for abstract than for concrete words in the word production system. © 2012 Psychonomic Society, Inc

Diffusion stop-layers for superconducting integrated circuits and qubits with Nb-based Josephson junctions

New technology for superconductor integrated circuits has been developed and is presented. It employs diffusion stoplayers (DSLs) to protect Josephson junctions (JJs) from interlayer migration of impurities, improve JJ critical current (Ic) targeting and reproducibility, eliminate aging, and eliminate pattern-dependent effects in Ic and tunneling characteristics of Nb/Al/AlOx/Nb junctions in integrated circuits. The latter effects were recently found in Nb-based JJs integrated into multilayered digital circuits. E.g., it was found that Josephson critical current density (Jc) may depend on the JJ's environment, on the type and size of metal layers making contact to niobium base (BE) and counter electrodes (CE) of the junction, and also change with time. Such Jc variations within a circuit reduce circuit performance and yield, and restrict integration scale. This variability of JJs is explained as caused by hydrogen contamination of Nb layers during wafer processing, which changes the height and structural properties of AlOx tunnel barrier. Redistribution of hydrogen impurities between JJ electrodes and other circuit layers by diffusion along Nb wires and through contacts between layers causes long-term drift of Jc. At least two DSLs are required to completely protect JJs from impurity diffusion effects - right below the junction BE and right above the junction CE. The simplest and the most technologically convenient DSLs we have found are thin (from 3 nm to 10 nm) layers of Al. They were deposited in-situ under the BE layer, thus forming an Al/Nb/Al/AlOx/Nb penta-layer, and under the first wiring layer to junctions' CE, thus forming an Al/Nb wiring bi-layer. A significant improvement of Jc uniformity on 150-mm wafer has also been obtained along with large improvements in Jc targeting and run-to-run reproducibility.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures; to be published in IEEE Transactions of Applied Superconductivit