Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 36, No. 4

• The Art of Glass Blowing • Portrait Painting • The Ox Roast • Herbal Soap-Making • Fly-Fishing and Fly-Tying • Chalkware • Silversmithing • Festival Focus • Festival Programs • Coopering • Knife Making • Corn Husk Dolls • Salt Glaze Pottery • Blacksmithing and Iron Working • Bird Carving • Soft Pretzelshttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/pafolklifemag/1116/thumbnail.jp

Perception of Symmetries in Drawings of Graphs

Symmetry is an important factor in human perception in general, as well as in the visualization of graphs in particular. There are three main types of symmetry: reflective, translational, and rotational. We report the results of a human subjects experiment to determine what types of symmetries are more salient in drawings of graphs. We found statistically significant evidence that vertical reflective symmetry is the most dominant (when selecting among vertical reflective, horizontal reflective, and translational). We also found statistically significant evidence that rotational symmetry is affected by the number of radial axes (the more, the better), with a notable exception at four axes.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2018

Small and Medium-Sized Towns in Europe: Conceptual, Methodological and Policy Issues

© 2017 Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG Despite that small and medium-sized towns (SMSTs) have been, and continue to be, a central part of the history of Europe, these places have largely been neglected by urban research. The ESPON TOWN project, on which this Special Issue builds, sought to redress this neglect performing a comparative analysis of their position and role across Europe. In this introductory paper we discuss some of the theoretical and methodological challenges when it came to identifying, studying and analysing SMSTs and the theoretical framework developed to inform our understanding of SMSTs. In particular, three themes are discussed. The first one is about the ontological problem of defining a town. Administrative, morphological and functional perspectives are considered. The second one reflects on a wide array of interpretative approaches about the relationship between towns and their regional context. The third one is about the thematic and multi-scalar perspectives that can characterise the policy approach to towns

Following the “community” thread from sociology to information behavior and informatics: Uncovering theoretical continuities and research opportunities

The authors review five paradigms from the discipline of community sociology (functionalism, evolution, conflict, interactionism, and exchange) to assess their potential utility for understanding everyday life information behavior and technology use. Their analysis considers the ways in which each paradigm defines the concepts of community, information, and technology. It also explores the insights offered by each paradigm regarding relationships between community and both information and technology. Accordingly, the authors highlight the ways in which existing information behavior and informatics scholarship draws from similar conceptual roots. Key insights drawn from this research, as well as remaining gaps and research questions, are examined. Additionally, they consider the limitations of each approach. The authors conclude by arguing for the value of a vigorous research program regarding information behavior and technology use in communities, particularly that which takes the community as the central unit of analysis. They consider key questions that could drive such a research program, as well as potentially fruitful conceptual and methodological approaches for this endeavor.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91098/1/asi21653.pd

Middle-status conformity revisited: The interplay between achieved and ascribed status

Decisions about conforming to or deviating from conventional practices in a field is an important concern of organization and management theory. The position that actors occupy in the status hierarchy has been shown to be an important determinant of these decisions. The dominant hypothesis, known as middle-status-conformity, posits that middle-status actors are more likely to conform to conventional practices than high- and low-status actors do. We challenge this hypothesis by revisiting its fundamental assumptions and developing a theory where actors’ propensity to conform based on their achieved status further depends on their ascribed status that actors inherit from their social group. Specifically, we propose that middle-status conformity applies only to actors who have a sense of security, based on their high ascribed status. For actors with low ascribed status, we propose that high-and low-status actors show greater conformity than middle-status actors. We test our hypotheses using data from the U.S. symphony orchestras from 1918 to 1969

Heritability of rhizomes in rhizomatous tall fescue cultivar JT-783

Tall fescue (Festucca arundinacea Shreb.) is an important bunch type turfgrass. The introduction of turf type tall fescue with rhizomes could have a positive impact on the sod industry by reduction in cost associated with netting tall fescue sod. A two year field study of the breeder field and foundation generation of the rhizomatous cultivar JT-783 was conducted near Moses Lake, Washington. At the same time a greenhouse study utilizing lysimeter tubes was conducted. The purpose of the field study was to determine the heritability of the rhizomatous trait within an open pollinated breeder field. The purpose of the greenhouse study was to compare the rooting characteristics of two rhizomatous cultivars to two non-rhizomatous cultivars under two fertilizer regimes. The breeder field of JT-783 was sampled randomly across a transect from southeast to northwest. 50 plants were harvested and removed to wash roots and inspect for rhizome production in the summer of 2011. 20 progeny of each parental line were planted in 2012 in a field in Moses Lake, Washington. 10 random plants were removed from the field and rhizomes were counted as present or absent. The lysimeter study conducted in Pullman, Washington was a random complete block design with 5 replications. The heritability of the rhizomes was estimated using the PROC MIXED model in SAS. Rhizome heritability was found to be low at R2 =0.018. However the mean rhizome number remained high among the progeny at 88%. The low heritability suggests that the trait could possibly be due to multiple genes which would have unpredictable heritability in an open pollinated random mating structure. The greenhouse lysimeter study showed no difference between cultivars on the second run, and significant differences between cultivars on the first run. The low fertility treatments had a higher root bulk density, root length and root diameter for both years. The lower fertility treatments stimulated the cultivars to explore more of the lysimeters to extract nutrients, which would explain the increased rooting for those treatments

Individual Differences in Patterning and Level of Physiological Activity. A Study of Arousal.

The contribution of physiology to psychology has been mainly twofold: First, it has provided constructs and a frame of reference for the attempts to explain behavior; second, it has provided techniques for experimental studies. Among the psychological studies that have employed physiological techniques one can distinguish two rather different approaches: one aims at discovering the physiological mechanisms underlying behavior, while the other has borrowed the methods of physiology to obtain additional variables for observation. [...