The effects of knowledge and integrative complexity on acceptance of federal wilderness designation

This study explores relationships between (1) knowledge and acceptance of federal wilderness designation and (2) increased knowledge and acceptability of federal wilderness designation with integrative complexity. Integrative complexity describes the structure of thoughts people have about an issue such as federal wilderness designation. Breaking traditional qualitative measurement techniques, a new scalar instrument was tested in this study to measure integrative complexity. Data were collected from undergraduate students at the University of New Hampshire (N=102), utilizing a pretest-posttest comparison group research design. As hypothesized, increased knowledge resulted in increased acceptance of federal wilderness designation. Conversely, integrative complexity scores decreased slightly as knowledge and acceptability increased. These findings support management efforts aimed at education, and imply that people may actually create stronger dichotomies about an issue when educated on that topic

IGNORING ‘NOSEY CHARLIE’: THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION’S REPONSE TO THE GAULLIST CRITIQUE OF AMERICAN POLICY IN VIETNAM (1961-1963

This dissertation examines the Kennedy administration’s rejection of French President Charles de Gaulle’s critique of American intervention in Vietnam in the early 1960s. In discussions on Vietnam de Gaulle consistently touched on four major themes from his first meeting with Kennedy in May 1961 until Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963: recognition of the principle of Vietnamese self-determination, the withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam, acceptance of controlled neutrality for Southeast Asia, and the necessity of dealing with mainland China directly. Kennedy rejectedallelementsofthisplatform. Hewashighlyscepticalofneutrality,whichhe viewed as a stalking horse for communism, and felt that the United States needed to show resolve in Southeast Asia or risk jeopardizing its prestige with allies across the globe. Franco-American relations in the 1960s were characterized by mutual mistrust due to fundamental disagreements over most major bilateral issues ranging from joint decision­ making within NATO, terms for negotiating with the Soviet Union, nuclear proliferation, United Nations peacekeeping missions in Africa, Britain’s role in the European Economic Community, and Vietnam. Had each president not initially approached the other with high hopes, it would be easy to dismiss their disagreement over Vietnam as typical of what had long been a very troubled relationship. Part of Kennedy’s rejection of de Gaulle’s proposals for Vietnam can be explained in American domestic politics during the 1950s and the social science academic backgrounds of the “Best and the Brightest” in his administration. Nevertheless, the way Kennedy’s New Frontiersmen framed their rejection of de Gaulle’s position on Vietnam reflected long-standing American cultural antipathy towards Europe, iii France in particular. After taking the White House, Kennedy was initially drawn in by de Gaulle, but when policy disputes did occur, he and men of his administration reached to traditional American stereotypes of France to explain French positions rather than debate de Gaulle’s ideas on their merits. They used feminizing language to varying degrees to dismiss French initiatives as the by-product of serious national character flaws, such as irrationality, jealousy, and selfishness. At no point did the Kennedy administration recognize the Gaullist position on Vietnam as a legitimate expression of relevant French experience, nor did they believe that France was capable of acting as an honest broker and negotiating a real truce between North and South. As a result, the Kennedy administration missed out on a perfect opportunity to disengage from a grim and distant conflict in late summer 1963, when de Gaulle had the resources and the will to broker peace. Much of the bloodshed of the next decade could have been avoided if not for the francophobic prejudices that led the Kennedy administration to mistakenly view a genuine French offer to help the United States avoid a long costly war as an attempt to undermine American aims for the regio

Controlling Smart-Phone Abuse: The Fair Labor Standards Act's Definition of "Work" in Nonexempt Employee Claims for Overtime

This is the published version

Local History Unbridled: Anecdotal Reflection in Bringing Digitized Microfilm to Digital Commons

When vinegar syndrome threatened to destroy microfilm containing a vast trove of history, Murray State University Libraries quickly responded. The microfilm--which included one of the broadest collections of local and regional newspapers in the Jackson Purchase area, as well as birth, marriage, and death certificates from Calloway and surrounding counties--was sent to a commercial vendor for digitization with the intention of archiving and making the contents accessible through the institutional repository, Digital Commons. Today, that microfilm is transitioning from moldering in closed stacks to becoming widely accessible to a global pool of researchers. Presenters will examine the history and logistics of our digitization process; delineate the staffing, workflow, progress and setbacks relating to creating and ingesting the metadata for each issue; and explore how collaboration across departments was key to the successful implementation of the project. Discussions will conclude with some of the unexpected benefits of the project, including classroom applications, the accessibility of the collection to historians and genealogists, and how the project might encourage deeper dives into other collections

The Aemulus Project III: Emulation of the Galaxy Correlation Function

Using the N-body simulations of the AEMULUS Project, we construct an emulator for the non-linear clustering of galaxies in real and redshift space. We construct our model of galaxy bias using the halo occupation framework, accounting for possible velocity bias. The model includes 15 parameters, including both cosmological and galaxy bias parameters. We demonstrate that our emulator achieves ~ 1% precision at the scales of interest, 0.1<r<10 h^{-1} Mpc, and recovers the true cosmology when tested against independent simulations. Our primary parameters of interest are related to the growth rate of structure, f, and its degenerate combination fsigma_8. Using this emulator, we show that the constraining power on these parameters monotonically increases as smaller scales are included in the analysis, all the way down to 0.1 h^{-1} Mpc. For a BOSS-like survey, the constraints on fsigma_8 from r<30 h^{-1} Mpc scales alone are more than a factor of two tighter than those from the fiducial BOSS analysis of redshift-space clustering using perturbation theory at larger scales. The combination of real- and redshift-space clustering allows us to break the degeneracy between f and sigma_8, yielding a 9% constraint on f alone for a BOSS-like analysis. The current AEMULUS simulations limit this model to surveys of massive galaxies. Future simulations will allow this framework to be extended to all galaxy target types, including emission-line galaxies.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 1 table; submitted to ApJ; the project webpage is available at https://aemulusproject.github.io ; typo in Figure 7 and caption updated, results unchange