“I’ve Got A Million Of These Stories”: Workers’ perspectives at The Eastern Fine Paper Corporation, 1960-2004

Maine’s modern history is punctuated by factory closings — the textile mills in the 1950\u27s, the shoe factories in the 1980\u27s and 1990\u27s, and most recently the paper mills in various corners of the state. Although numerous studies document the economic impact of these unfortunate events, we have little recourse to understanding the human impact — the stories of the men and women whose lives were so closely entwined with the mills and the communities they so often founded and supported. In this article, Amy Stevens weaves together the documents and the stories that provide a multifaceted picture of the rise and fall of the Eastern Fine Paper Company and its “family” of workers

The Role of Spiritual Fitness on Burnout and Organizational Commitment in High-Stress Environments

This quantitative study examined the relationships between burnout, spiritual fitness, and organizational commitment in National Guard servicemembers. Recent deployments and chronic stressors have resulted in an emergence of mental health concerns, burnout, and turnover intentions in this population. Research has indicated that elements of spirituality address these concerns and suggest that more spiritual individuals are more resilient, less susceptible to burnout, and find positive meaning in work. This study examined these variables using the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach & Jackson, 1981), the Organizational Commitment Scale (Meyer & Allen, 1997), and the SOCOM Spiritual Fitness Scale (Alexander et al., 2020). Correlations were used to analyze relationships between burnout and both organizational commitment and spiritual fitness, and linear multiple regression was used to examine whether spiritual fitness moderated the burnout-organizational commitment relationship. The results confirmed the hypotheses that burnout would be inversely associated with organizational commitment (r=-0.21, p\u3e0.01) and that spiritual fitness would be inversely associated with burnout (r=-0.16, p\u3e0.05). Regression results demonstrated that the total spiritual fitness score was not a moderator of the burnout-organizational commitment relationship (β=0.11, p=0.35). But a subscale of spiritual fitness, Service and Sacrifice for the Greater Good (SSGG), or “horizontal spirituality,” did moderate this relationship, such that those high in SSGG maintained organizational commitment levels even when burnout was high (β=0.20, p=0.05). The SSGG commitment to selfless service, altruism, and a common mission aligns with both biblical and theoretical ideas on meaning, purpose, and sacrifice and was relevant for both theist and non-theist individuals in this study. These findings suggest that spiritual fitness could be a cognitive resource for making sense of stressors, and fostering these elements of horizontal spirituality in the workplace could potentially reduce turnover, impact burnout, and enhance organizational commitment

Women in Maine\u27s Paper Industry, 1880 - 2006

With support from a Women In Curriculum research grant, Pauleena MacDougall, Associate Director of the Maine Folklife Center assisted by Amy Stevens, graduate student in history, conducted a series of oral histories with women who work or used to work in the pulp and paper industry. The project began May 1, 2006 and was completed September 30, 2006. They asked questions about clothing women wore to work, stories they may have about the mill and relations between workers. Their primary focus was on the expressive culture of the women as we attempt to understand female culture in an industrial setting.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/wmp/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Power of Place in Memory: An Oral History of the Eastern Corporation in Brewer,Maine

“If preservationists are to be true to the insights of a broad, inclusive social history encompassing gender, race and class . . . it means emphasizing the building types — such as tenement, factory, union hall or church — that have housed the working people’s everyday lives.”1 This article introduces a special issue of Maine History on the state’s paper industry and particularly the fortunes of the Eastern Fine Paper Company in Brewer. The mill, which closed in 2005,was an economic and cultural mainstay of this Maine town, and in this article MacDougall and Stevens trace the history of a unique project that documented, from a variety of perspectives, the closure and its effect on the lives of the people who, for generations, had worked and lived in the mill community. Pauleena MacDougall is director of The Maine Folklife Center and faculty associate in Anthropology at the University of Maine. She received her Ph.D.in American history from the University of Maine in 1995 and has published widely on Penobscot Indian language, culture, and history, including The Penobscot Dance of Resistance: Tradition in the History of a People (University of New England Press).Amy Stevens, a lifelong Brewer resident, received her M.A. in history from the University of Maine in 2007 and worked for the Old York Historical Society, the Maine Folklife Center, Primary Source, and the American Folk Festival in Bangor, researching topics of special interest to Maine schools and Maine curriculums. She teaches elementary school

Parent and Family Outcomes of PEERS: A Social Skills Intervention for Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Raising a child with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is associated with increased family chaos and parent distress. Successful long-term treatment outcomes are dependent on healthy systemic functioning, but the family impact of treatment is rarely evaluated. The Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS) is a social skills intervention designed for adolescents with high-functioning ASD. This study assessed the impact of PEERS on family chaos, parenting stress, and parenting self-efficacy via a randomized, controlled trial. Results suggested beneficial effects for the experimental group in the domain of family chaos compared to the waitlist control, while parents in the PEERS experimental group also demonstrated increased parenting self-efficacy. These findings highlight adjunctive family system benefits of PEERS intervention and suggest the need for overall better understanding of parent and family outcomes of ASD interventions

Nature does not rely on long-lived electronic quantum coherence for photosynthetic energy transfer

During the first steps of photosynthesis, the energy of impinging solar photons is transformed into electronic excitation energy of the light-harvesting biomolecular complexes. The subsequent energy transfer to the reaction center is commonly rationalized in terms of excitons moving on a grid of biomolecular chromophores on typical timescales [Formula: see text]100 fs. Today's understanding of the energy transfer includes the fact that the excitons are delocalized over a few neighboring sites, but the role of quantum coherence is considered as irrelevant for the transfer dynamics because it typically decays within a few tens of femtoseconds. This orthodox picture of incoherent energy transfer between clusters of a few pigments sharing delocalized excitons has been challenged by ultrafast optical spectroscopy experiments with the Fenna-Matthews-Olson protein, in which interference oscillatory signals up to 1.5 ps were reported and interpreted as direct evidence of exceptionally long-lived electronic quantum coherence. Here, we show that the optical 2D photon echo spectra of this complex at ambient temperature in aqueous solution do not provide evidence of any long-lived electronic quantum coherence, but confirm the orthodox view of rapidly decaying electronic quantum coherence on a timescale of 60 fs. Our results can be considered as generic and give no hint that electronic quantum coherence plays any biofunctional role in real photoactive biomolecular complexes. Because in this structurally well-defined protein the distances between bacteriochlorophylls are comparable to those of other light-harvesting complexes, we anticipate that this finding is general and directly applies to even larger photoactive biomolecular complexes

Fundamental Studies of Reactive Intermediates in Organometallic Chemistry

The techniques of ion cyclotron resonance spectroscopy and photoionization-mass spectrometry are used to characterize the thermochemistry and reactivity of transition metal and organometallic species in the gas-phase. Chapter I gives an introduction emphasizing the need for physical studies of these compounds. An assessment of the differences in chemical properties and reactivity between the gas phase and solution is also made. Chapter II details the properties and reactions of (CO)5MnR (R = H, CH3) determined using the techniques of ion cyclotron reso­nance spectroscopy. An examination of the products (CO)5Mn(R)H+, (CO)4Mn(R)H+, and (CO)5Mn+ which result from proton transfer with varying exothermicity to (CO)5MnR permits several thermochemical and mechanistic inferences. In particular the prcton affinities of these species are derived and the mechanism of reductive elimination of RH from the conjugate acids is detailed. An examination of processes involving negative ions yields the heterolytic bond energies D[(CO)5Mn--R+]. The hydride is found to be an exceptionally strong acid in the gas phase. Positive and negative ion mass spectra and ion-molecule reactions are reported briefly. Chapter III presents the results of an ion cyclotron-resonance trapped ion study of the kinetics of proton transfer from MnH+ (formed as a fragment ion from HMn(CO)5 by electron impact) to bases of varying strength. Deprotonation is rapid with bases whose proton affinity exceeds 196 ± 3 kcal mol-1. Using this value for PA[Mn] yields the homolytic bond dissociation energy D[Mn+-H] = 53 ± 3 kcal mol-1. In Chapter IV the results of a photoionization mass­ spectrometric determination of the ionization potentials and selected fragment ion appearance potentials of (CO)5MnR where R = H , CH3, CH2F, CHF2 and CF3 are presented. A comparison of the appearance potential of (CO)5Mn+ from all five species yields the metal-carbon bond dissociation energies relative to the metal-hydrogen bond dissociation energy with no additional thermochemical data. Using the literature value D0[(CO)5Mn-H ] = 57 kcal/mol gives D0[(CO)5Mn-R] = 44, 32, 33, and 42 kcal/mol, respectively. Fragmentation thresholds for the metal carbene fragment ions (Co)5MnCXY+ where X, Y = H or F are analyzed to yield the fluoride and hydride affinities of these species. Ion cyclotron resonance spectroscopy is used to examine hydride and fluoride transfer react ions involving these carbenes to corroborate the photoionization data. The carbene bond dissociation energies D0[(CO)5Mn+-CXY] decrease from 104 to 98 to 82 kcal/moL with successive substitution of F for H . In Chapter V the proton affinities of twenty organotransition metal complexes in the gas phase are reported. Combined with adiabatic ionization potentials, these data yield metal-hydrogen hemolytic bond energies for the sixteen species for which protonation occurs on the metal center. These bond energies range from 53 to 87 kcal/mol. Bond energies increase on going from a first-row complex to its second-row homologue, but no increase is seen on going to the third-row metal. The metal-hydrogen bond energy decreases markedly with increasing oxidation state of the same metal. Comparison to isoelectronic neutral complexes is made.</p

Effects of Performance Feedback on High School Teachers’ Use of Opportunities to Respond and Positive Feedback: Considering Efficiency in High Need Schools

The transition into high school presents new challenges for adolescents and performance in ninth grade is highly predictive of success throughout the remainder of high school. However, focus on teacher performance has great promise for increasing student engagement in the classroom and raising student achievement. Unfortunately, many of these practices typically are not implemented within classrooms where students are at highest risk for failure. Two studies were implemented to examine the effect of simple performance feedback strategies as a means of increasing teachers’ provision of opportunities for student responses and positive feedback during instruction. Results showed no effect in teacher behavior as a result of performance feedback. A discussion considers the implications of high need schools, efficiency, and the necessary and sufficient strategies for changing teacher behavior

Social Media in the Sexual Lives of African American and Latino Youth: Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Neighborhood

There has been significant interest in the role of social media in the lives of adolescents, particularly as it relates to sexual risk. Researchers have focused on understanding usage behaviors, quantifying effects of social media exposure and activity, and using social media to intervene. Much of this work has focused on college students and non-minority youth. In this paper, we examine the growing body of literature around social media use among US minority youth and its intersection with sexual risk behavior. We introduce the concept of the “digital neighborhood” and examine the intersection of social media and sexual health in two domains: 1) sexual content in social media and 2) evidence of social media effects on sexual behavior. Finally, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for researchers and practitioners engaging youth of color