Comparison of full-text versus metadata searching in an institutional repository: Case study of the UNT Scholarly Works

Authors in the library science field disagree about the importance of using costly resources to create local metadata records, particularly for scholarly materials that have full-text search alternatives. At the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries, we decided to test this concept by answering the question: What percentage of search terms retrieved results based on full-text versus metadata values for items in the UNT Scholarly Works institutional repository? The analysis matched search query logs to indexes of the metadata records and full text of the items in the collection. Results show the distribution of item discoveries that were based on metadata exclusively, on full text exclusively, and on the combination of both. This paper describes in detail the methods and findings of this study

Improved Student Outcomes in a Flipped Statistics Course

Statistics is a required competency in numerous college majors, but students frequently approach the topic with anxiety. This paper describes an undergraduate statistics course that was flipped, with most of the content delivery moved online and class time devoted to application and practice. Students were given a menu of learning tools from which to choose and were free to utilize as many or as few as they felt was appropriate, giving them ownership of their learning experience and the opportunity to tailor the course to their personal needs. The classroom experience included brief segments of lecture but consisted primarily of exercises and peer-facilitation. Course grading was based solely on four exams, a comprehensive final exam, and a major end-of-course project. Student response to the format was somewhat bimodal. Comprehensive final exam grades were significantly higher (an average of almost one full letter grade), and course pass rates rose using the flipped course format

Altruism, Egoism, or Something Else: Rewarding Volunteers Effectively and Affordably

Laura Phillips, PhD, is an assistant professor of management sciences at Abilene Christian University, Abilene, Texas, 79699. Mark Phillips, PhD, is an associate professor of management sciences at Abilene Christian University, Abilene, Texas, 79699

Between Economic Planning and Market Competition: Institutional Law and Economics in the US

In 1926 John Maurice Clark published a seminal text in institutionalist economics, Social Control of Business, surveying the ways in which business was subject to control by a variety of formal and informal constraints. 1 The text rejected mainstream ideas in neoclassical political economy by explaining how individual self-interest and competition could be manipulated not only through legal rules but also by custom, habit, codes of ethics, and morals. Representative of the institutionalist movement, Clark discarded presumptions of an individualistic economy based on market competition. Instead, he posited that long-term public goals of prosperity and equity could be achieved through the public and private study of “industry itself,” which existed “on the frontier where new policies are being worked out.”2 The book fused the development of the regulatory state, giving particular attention to administrative law, with self-regulation by businesses and trade associations. Both public and private regulations, he argued, advanced codes of conduct to standardize business activities and control competitive practices. Building on the work of Richard Ely, John Commons, and Dean Roscoe Pound, Clark’s Social Control of Business extended progressive liberals’ initiatives for regulatory state expansion through administrative agencies and it advanced private rulemaking by trade associations as a complement to the development of mandatory public regulation

Contested Meanings of Freedom: Workingmen\u27s Wages, the Company Store System, and the Godcharles v. Wigeman Decision

In 1886, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited employers from paying wages in company store scrip and mandated monthly wage payments. The court held that the legislature could not prescribe mandatory wage contracts for legally competent workingmen. The decision quashed over two decades of efforts to end the “truck system.” Although legislators had agreed that wage payments redeemable only in company store goods appeared antithetical to the free labor wage system, two obstacles complicated legislative action. Any law meant to enhance laborers’ rights could neither favor one class over another nor infringe any workingman’s ability to make voluntary contracts. These distinctions, however, were not as rigid and laissez faire-oriented as depicted by conventional history. Labor reformers argued that principles of equity must supplement these categories of class legislation and contract freedom. This essay explores how legal doctrine helped both sides of the anti-truck debate articulate the contested meanings of liberty. Ultimately, the Godcharles ruling enshrined the specialness of workingmen’s labor contracts and rejected the use of equity principles to justify contract regulations, but the controversy also informed future labor strategies, especially the turn to state police powers as the rubric under which workers’ safety, morals, and health could be protected

Migration ecology and distribution of king eiders

Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2005Alaskan-breeding king eiders (Somateria spectabilis) disperse from nesting areas on the Arctic Coastal Plain and move through the Beaufort Sea to wing molt and winter locations in remote areas of the Bering Sea. Knowledge of king eider distribution outside the breeding period is critical to provide regulatory agencies with opportunities to minimize potential negative impacts of resource development. To characterize the nonbreeding distribution of king eiders, we collected location data of 60 individuals over two years from satellite telemetry. During post-breeding migration, male king eiders had much broader use areas in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea than female eiders. Chronology of wing molt was earlier for males than females in all years. Throughout wing molt and winter, eider locations were closer to shore, in shallower water with lower salinity than randomly selected locations. Short residence time of king eiders in deep water areas suggests the Alaskan Beaufort Sea may not be as critical a staging area for eiders during spring as it is during post-breeding. This study provides some of the first large-scale descriptions of king eider migration, distribution, and habitat outside the breeding season.Use of the Beaufort sea by king eiders breeding on the North Slope of Alaska -- Large-scale movements and habitat characteristics of king eiders throughout the nonbreeding period

Philip Scranton & Patrick Fridenson\u27s Reimagining Business History

Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson—two senior scholars from Rutgers University and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, respectively—have brought together their decades of experience as practitioners and editors to explore new directions in research and writing in business history. But this is a different kind of historiographical book. In fact, it is “the inverse of a historiographical analysis”; it seeks to provide a “prospective” “collection of ordered, grouped assertions” (9). It is a “book of perspectives” that “has purposes not an argument” and is intended to be browsed, not read cover to cover. Yet, the authors clearly take aim at “traditional business history” and encourage business historians to step “away from our decades-long reliance on economics, economic history, and management science” (9). In doing so, they intend to bring business history into wider debates in humanistic and social science inquiries

Recovering Contingency within American Antimonopoly and Democracy

*This is the fourth post in a symposium on William Novak’s New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State. For other posts in the series, click here. In his chapter on antitrust law and the American antimonopoly tradition, the penultimate substantive chapter of the book, Novak covers much familiar ground. Yet, he is not focused on the conventional areas of debate in antitrust history, which have included recovering the congressional intent behind the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, recreating the economic logic of early antitrust jurisprudence, or surveying the doctrinal shift from “literalism” to the rule of reason. Instead, Novak’s narrative focuses on the “legal-intellectual framework for economic regulation” posited by institutional economists and legal realists, and the ways in which that framework was operationalized, especially in the administrative law of unfair competition. What is new (and provocative) is that he portrays this framework as unitary product of the “new democracy.

An analysis and classification of the questions and exercises in ten fourth grade geography books on the basis of the higher mental processes required for their solution

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1945. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Paul D. Moreno\u27s The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal: The Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism

Paul Moreno, the Grewcock Chair in Constitutional History at Hillsdale College, sets out to explain how the natural rights constitutionalism of the Founders was replaced by an ‘entitlement-based welfare state of modern liberalism’ by the late 1930s. The book is an ‘analytic narrative’, drawing on both constitutional theory and current ‘public choice’ law and economics, and contributes to recent scholarship by libertarian-minded legal scholars, such as David Bernstein and David Mayer, among others