Experiment at Nebraska The First Two Years of a Cluster College

In November 1968 the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska was asked to react to a document coming from a faculty-student committee charged with examining the feasibility of establishing an innovating college on the Lincoln campus. It attempted to spell out the need for such innovation, and it offered a plan for fulfilling the need that it delineated. This is that document: 1 Within the past generation a new kind of student, a new kind of faculty, and a new kind of university have developed. To meet the challenges which these changes present and to provide for an educational and national future whose nature is unforseeable, many persons have concluded that there is a need for experiments in university curriculum and organization. The purpose of such endeavors should be a graduate who is sharply aware of himself, his society, and his world, able and desirous of continuing his liberal and professional education beyond the classroom. The New Students Students who come to the University are different from those who came twenty years ago.! A larger number of high school graduates choose to enroll than before and, of those who come, a larger number graduate. Though the numbers are greater, their quality is not inferior often. Television and other instruments of mass communication have provided them with astonishing funds of miscellaneous information, some of it inaccurate, much of it irrelevant, and part of it useful. In addition, many have traveled widely. The new students come to us with new formal preparation. High school science programs have been set up by distinguished scientists, the new math has become widespread-and public school English has undergone elaborate revision. In the future, advanced placement programs promise to change drastically the relation of entering students to the University. Perhaps more important, the temper of the undergraduates seems to be changing. The students have learned to react quickly to situations far from home ground, and echoes of Vietnam and Berkeley can be heard in Lincoln. In some universities the students have not hesitated to bite the hand that presumes to feed them, and generally students are becoming increasingly critical of their courses, professors, and colleges. They complain that universities have made them numbers on IBM cards, anonymous to teachers and advisers, and a gray mass to their administrators. They resent a lack of individual attention. For the past two years-at least responsible students through their official channels (e.g. ASUN [Associated Students of University of Nebraska]) have undertaken to scrutinize university programs. It is significant that the disgruntled students are not the weakest. The most critical are often the brightest, the most committed socially, and the most responsible morally. The best seem to be the most critical

Robert McAlmon: Expatriate Publisher and Writer

Though Robert MeAlmon has never received critical or popular acclaim, he deserves attention. An important expatriate in Paris in the Twenties, he was a writer, a publisher and a friend of the great and near-great who lived and worked there. He drank, talked, quarrelled with all of them; and we can understand them better for knowledge of him. McAlmon wrote a great deal, two short novels, four volumes of stories, four volumes of poems and a long autobiography. If these books do not earn him a place among the foremost novelists and poets of his time, they ought not be forgotten. His own publishing house, the Contact Publishing Company, brought out seven of his volumes; and it also brought out books by English and American exiles who became more famous than he. He published important work by Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Marsden Hartley, Robert M. Coates, Ezra Pound and others. Because of his activities as a publisher, as a writer and as a member of the Paris circle, he should be included in accounts of the literary activities of the Twenties. MeAlmon and the books he wrote and published are part of what Gertrude Stein called the lost generation. He belonged, as Malcolm Cowley says, to a period of confused transition from values already fixed to values that had to be created. l Other expatriates in Europe at that time did not remain lost. Ernest Hemingway became a bestseller; F. Scott Fitzgerald has been turned into the official chronicler of his time; E. E. Cummings lectures at Harvard; Samuel Putnam translates Cervantes and Rabelais to great acclaim; Malcolm Cowley is a prominent critic and man of letters. The wanderings of many of the exiles ended. But McAlmon\u27s search for certainty continued. He traveled over much of Europe and America, hunting for an escape from ennui, taking what pleasures came his way. All his life he lived with judgments suspended. Unable to embrace the religiosity of Eliot, the socialism of the early Dos Passos, the mysticism of the later Huxley, unsatisfied in Paris, Istambul, Mexico, he was constantly on the move; he was at home no place. Like Thomas Wolfe, MCAlmon found that he could not go home again. Putting down no roots, he continually harked back to his native prairies. Because he wrote of his memories of Dakota, Ford Madox Ford could say that he represents-though geography is not our strongest point-that West-Middle-West-by-West of which we have been taught to and do expect so much. 2 Later he wrote of other countries, and new experiences, of Egypt and Turkey, of Berlin, and of Mexico. But always, whatever his subject matter, there remained something of the wide-eyed preacher\u27s kid in his stories, even in those which dealt with the most abandoned lives of a disturbed postwar era. In almost all of them there is a freshness and a lack of contrivance. If his writing has a kind of slapdash that perfectionists can not countenance, it has its attractiveness, too. Mr. McAlmon differs from all other serious poets of this age in being apparently quite without literary environment or background of any kind, Basil Bunting wrote in 1931. It may be that this virgin mindedness specially fits him to be the poet of America, the land without culture. Certainly what I know of his work has an air of authenticity while being foreign to the essentially European culture of Pound and Eliot. If MCAlmon is not a great or accomplished poet or novelist he is at least a conscious pioneer of the American nationalism which has hitherto been prophesied but never effectively practiced. When all has been said, and much more will have to be said, there is a certain residue of permanent interest in McAlmon\u27s fiction. If his village rascals are not Huck Finns (whose are?), their stories are told by a real man, a man of courage and astounding candor. He has an attitude, a point of view. If the world\u27s going to hell, he said in his memoirs, I\u27m going with it and not in the back ranks either. So much can suspicion assail one\u27s mind about the spiritual, the reverent, and the religious. My mind is not scientific and it is tainted with much bias, but such as it is it roots for giving materialism and science its day or chance. His tone of fierce no-funny-business colors all his books

Robert McAlmon: Expatriate Publisher and Writer

Though Robert MeAlmon has never received critical or popular acclaim, he deserves attention. An important expatriate in Paris in the Twenties, he was a writer, a publisher and a friend of the great and near-great who lived and worked there. He drank, talked, quarrelled with all of them; and we can understand them better for knowledge of him. McAlmon wrote a great deal, two short novels, four volumes of stories, four volumes of poems and a long autobiography. If these books do not earn him a place among the foremost novelists and poets of his time, they ought not be forgotten. His own publishing house, the Contact Publishing Company, brought out seven of his volumes; and it also brought out books by English and American exiles who became more famous than he. He published important work by Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Marsden Hartley, Robert M. Coates, Ezra Pound and others. Because of his activities as a publisher, as a writer and as a member of the Paris circle, he should be included in accounts of the literary activities of the Twenties. MeAlmon and the books he wrote and published are part of what Gertrude Stein called the lost generation. He belonged, as Malcolm Cowley says, to a period of confused transition from values already fixed to values that had to be created. l Other expatriates in Europe at that time did not remain lost. Ernest Hemingway became a bestseller; F. Scott Fitzgerald has been turned into the official chronicler of his time; E. E. Cummings lectures at Harvard; Samuel Putnam translates Cervantes and Rabelais to great acclaim; Malcolm Cowley is a prominent critic and man of letters. The wanderings of many of the exiles ended. But McAlmon\u27s search for certainty continued. He traveled over much of Europe and America, hunting for an escape from ennui, taking what pleasures came his way. All his life he lived with judgments suspended. Unable to embrace the religiosity of Eliot, the socialism of the early Dos Passos, the mysticism of the later Huxley, unsatisfied in Paris, Istambul, Mexico, he was constantly on the move; he was at home no place. Like Thomas Wolfe, MCAlmon found that he could not go home again. Putting down no roots, he continually harked back to his native prairies. Because he wrote of his memories of Dakota, Ford Madox Ford could say that he represents-though geography is not our strongest point-that West-Middle-West-by-West of which we have been taught to and do expect so much. 2 Later he wrote of other countries, and new experiences, of Egypt and Turkey, of Berlin, and of Mexico. But always, whatever his subject matter, there remained something of the wide-eyed preacher\u27s kid in his stories, even in those which dealt with the most abandoned lives of a disturbed postwar era. In almost all of them there is a freshness and a lack of contrivance. If his writing has a kind of slapdash that perfectionists can not countenance, it has its attractiveness, too. Mr. McAlmon differs from all other serious poets of this age in being apparently quite without literary environment or background of any kind, Basil Bunting wrote in 1931. It may be that this virgin mindedness specially fits him to be the poet of America, the land without culture. Certainly what I know of his work has an air of authenticity while being foreign to the essentially European culture of Pound and Eliot. If MCAlmon is not a great or accomplished poet or novelist he is at least a conscious pioneer of the American nationalism which has hitherto been prophesied but never effectively practiced. When all has been said, and much more will have to be said, there is a certain residue of permanent interest in McAlmon\u27s fiction. If his village rascals are not Huck Finns (whose are?), their stories are told by a real man, a man of courage and astounding candor. He has an attitude, a point of view. If the world\u27s going to hell, he said in his memoirs, I\u27m going with it and not in the back ranks either. So much can suspicion assail one\u27s mind about the spiritual, the reverent, and the religious. My mind is not scientific and it is tainted with much bias, but such as it is it roots for giving materialism and science its day or chance. His tone of fierce no-funny-business colors all his books

Experiment at Nebraska The First Two Years of a Cluster College

In November 1968 the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska was asked to react to a document coming from a faculty-student committee charged with examining the feasibility of establishing an innovating college on the Lincoln campus. It attempted to spell out the need for such innovation, and it offered a plan for fulfilling the need that it delineated. This is that document: 1 Within the past generation a new kind of student, a new kind of faculty, and a new kind of university have developed. To meet the challenges which these changes present and to provide for an educational and national future whose nature is unforseeable, many persons have concluded that there is a need for experiments in university curriculum and organization. The purpose of such endeavors should be a graduate who is sharply aware of himself, his society, and his world, able and desirous of continuing his liberal and professional education beyond the classroom. The New Students Students who come to the University are different from those who came twenty years ago.! A larger number of high school graduates choose to enroll than before and, of those who come, a larger number graduate. Though the numbers are greater, their quality is not inferior often. Television and other instruments of mass communication have provided them with astonishing funds of miscellaneous information, some of it inaccurate, much of it irrelevant, and part of it useful. In addition, many have traveled widely. The new students come to us with new formal preparation. High school science programs have been set up by distinguished scientists, the new math has become widespread-and public school English has undergone elaborate revision. In the future, advanced placement programs promise to change drastically the relation of entering students to the University. Perhaps more important, the temper of the undergraduates seems to be changing. The students have learned to react quickly to situations far from home ground, and echoes of Vietnam and Berkeley can be heard in Lincoln. In some universities the students have not hesitated to bite the hand that presumes to feed them, and generally students are becoming increasingly critical of their courses, professors, and colleges. They complain that universities have made them numbers on IBM cards, anonymous to teachers and advisers, and a gray mass to their administrators. They resent a lack of individual attention. For the past two years-at least responsible students through their official channels (e.g. ASUN [Associated Students of University of Nebraska]) have undertaken to scrutinize university programs. It is significant that the disgruntled students are not the weakest. The most critical are often the brightest, the most committed socially, and the most responsible morally. The best seem to be the most critical

Molybdenum evidence for expansive sulfidic water masses in ~750Ma oceans

The Ediacaran appearance of large animals, including motile bilaterians, is commonly hypothesized to reflect a physiologically enabling increase in atmospheric and oceanic oxygen abundances (pO2). To date, direct evidence for low oxygen in pre-Ediacaran oceans has focused on chemical signatures in the rock record that reflect conditions in local basins, but this approach is both biased to constrain only shallower basins and statistically limited when we seek to follow the evolution of mean ocean chemical state through time. Because the abundance and isotopic composition of molybdenum (Mo) in organic-rich euxinic sediments can vary in response to changes in global redox conditions, Mo geochemistry provides independent constraints on the global evolution of well-oxygenated environments. Here, we establish a theoretical framework to access global marine Mo cycle in the past from the abundance and isotope composition of ancient seawater. Further, we investigate the ~ 750 Ma Walcott Member of the Chuar Group, Grand Canyon, which accumulated in a rift basin with open connection to the ocean. Iron speciation data from upper Walcott shales indicate that local bottom waters were anoxic and sulfidic, consistent with their high organic content (up to 20 wt.%). Similar facies in Phanerozoic successions contain high concentrations of redox-sensitive metals, but in the Walcott Member, abundances of Mo and U, as well as Mo/TOC (~ 0.5 ppm/wt.%) are low. δ98Mo values also fall well below modern equivalents (0.99 ± 0.13‰ versus ~ 2.35‰ today). These signatures are consistent with model predictions where sulfidic waters cover ~ 1–4% of the global seafloor, corresponding to a ~ 20–80 fold increase compared to the modern ocean. Therefore, our results suggest globally expansive sulfidic water masses in mid-Neoproterozoic oceans, bridging a nearly 700 million-year gap in previous Mo data. We propose that anoxic and sulfidic (euxinic) conditions governed Mo cycling in the oceans even as ferruginous subsurface waters re-appeared 800–750 Ma, and we interpret this anoxic ocean state to reflect a markedly lower atmospheric and oceanic O2 level, consistent with the hypothesis that pO2 acted as an evolutionary barrier to the emergence of large motile bilaterian animals prior to the Ediacaran Period.Organismic and Evolutionary Biolog

Current measurements off the west coast of South America: November 1981 - March 1985

Several current meter moorings were deployed over the continental margin of Peru along 5° and 10°S to study the Peru current system. The observation period from November 1981 to March 1985 covered the occurrence of El Nino 1982-83. This report presents the six-hourly low-passed data sets of each mooring. Progressive vector diagrams, stick plots and time series of the east- and northward current component, temperature and pressure are shown. Histograms of speed, direction and temperature as well as a statistical page showing means and standard deviations are also included

Surface processes recorded by rocks and soils on Meridiani Planum, Mars: Microscopic Imager observations during Opportunity's first three extended missions

The Microscopic Imager (MI) on the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has returned images of Mars with higher resolution than any previous camera system, allowing detailed petrographic and sedimentological studies of the rocks and soils at the Meridiani Planum landing site. Designed to simulate a geologist's hand lens, the MI is mounted on Opportunity's instrument arm and can resolve objects 0.1 mm across or larger. This paper provides an overview of MI operations, data calibration, and analysis of MI data returned during the first 900 sols (Mars days) of the Opportunity landed mission. Analyses of Opportunity MI data have helped to resolve major questions about the origin of observed textures and features. These studies support eolian sediment transport, rather than impact surge processes, as the dominant depositional mechanism for Burns formation strata. MI stereo observations of a rock outcrop near the rim of Erebus Crater support the previous interpretation of similar sedimentary structures in Eagle Crater as being formed by surficial flow of liquid water. Well-sorted spherules dominate ripple surfaces on the Meridiani plains, and the size of spherules between ripples decreases by about 1 mm from north to south along Opportunity's traverse between Endurance and Erebus craters

Evaluation of a 'virtual' approach to commissioning health research

BACKGROUND: The objective of this study was to evaluate the implementation of a 'virtual' (computer-mediated) approach to health research commissioning. This had been introduced experimentally in a DOH programme – the 'Health of Londoners Programme' – in order to assess whether is could enhance the accessibility, transparency and effectiveness of commissioning health research. The study described here was commissioned to evaluate this novel approach, addressing these key questions. METHODS: A naturalistic-experimental approach was combined with principles of action research. The different commissioning groups within the programme were randomly allocated to either the traditional face-to-face mode or the novel 'virtual' mode. Mainly qualitative data were gathered including observation of all (virtual and face-to-face) commissioning meetings; semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of participants (n = 32/66); structured questionnaires and interviews with lead researchers of early commissioned projects. All members of the commissioning groups were invited to participate in collaborative enquiry groups which participated actively in the analysis process. RESULTS: The virtual process functioned as intended, reaching timely and relatively transparent decisions that participants had confidence in. Despite the potential for greater access using a virtual approach, few differences were found in practice. Key advantages included physical access, a more flexible and extended time period for discussion, reflection and information gathering and a more transparent decision-making process. Key challenges were the reduction of social cues available in a computer-mediated medium that require novel ways of ensuring appropriate dialogue, feedback and interaction. However, in both modes, the process was influenced by a range of factors and was not technology driven. CONCLUSION: There is potential for using computer-mediated communication within the research commissioning process. This may enhance access, effectiveness and transparency of decision-making but further development is needed for this to be fully realised, including attention to process as well as the computer-mediated medium

Veneers, rinds, and fracture fills: Relatively late alteration of sedimentary rocks at Meridiani Planum, Mars

Veneers and thicker rinds that coat outcrop surfaces and partially cemented fracture fills formed perpendicular to bedding document relatively late stage alteration of ancient sedimentary rocks at Meridiani Planum, Mars. The chemistry of submillimeter thick, buff-colored veneers reflects multiple processes at work since the establishment of the current plains surface. Veneer composition is dominated by the mixing of silicate-rich dust and sulfate-rich outcrop surface, but it has also been influenced by mineral precipitation, including NaCl, and possibly by limited physical or chemical weathering of sulfate minerals. Competing processes of chemical alteration (perhaps mediated by thin films of water or water vapor beneath blanketing soils) and sandblasting of exposed outcrop surfaces determine the current distribution of veneers. Dark-toned rinds several millimeters thick reflect more extensive surface alteration but also indicate combined dust admixture, halite precipitation, and possible minor sulfate removal. Cemented fracture fills that are differentially resistant to erosion occur along the margins of linear fracture systems possibly related to impact. These appear to reflect limited groundwater activity along the margins of fractures, cementing mechanically introduced fill derived principally from outcrop rocks. The limited thickness and spatial distribution of these three features suggest that aqueous activity has been rare and transient or has operated at exceedingly low rates during the protracted interval since outcropping Meridiani strata were exposed on the plains surface