Review of \u3ci\u3eOur Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen\u3c/i\u3e by Joe Drape

The best book on Great Plains sports is H. G. Bissinger\u27s Friday Night Lights (1990). That classic has spawned a critically acclaimed television series and numerous awards. FNL not only told the story of a football season at Odessa Permian High School in urban West Texas; it also asked and answered some very big questions that concerned high school athletic corruption, coaching pressures, cheerleader/ football player interaction, school integration, local community politics, treatment of players of color, Texas\u27s new rules prohibiting playing with failing grades, pressures on teachers, drugs, player abuse, and on and on. It remains a beautifully written and crafted expose. Our Boys is not Friday Night Lights. The location and subject are comparable: a season with a Great Plains football community with a winning tradition. Smith Center, Kansas, county seat of Smith County situated in northwest Kansas near the Nebraska border, is a small community of 1,931 hardy Kansans. Note that Odessa, Texas, has a population of 90,000 plus-a significant difference, but the passions in Odessa and Smith Center seem quite similar. Many of the Smith County residents are farmers and make use of the hotly contested Republican River waters for irrigation. Farmers, whom Ag schools term producers, produce grains and beef for regional and national markets; Smith Center High School produces football players, occasionally for Kansas State University and more often for regional four-year colleges

Law and Science: An Introduction

Law and science have been nervous partners for decades. Legal scholarship based upon scientific method, controversial at first, is now an established genre of the literature. It is particularly prominent in criminal justice studies, but it can be found in almost any aspect of legal research. Social scientists in criminology, political science, and economics have addressed legal issues, but they are less apt to restrict their conclusions to locality or region or subject matter. For the study of regions, historians have the edge, and some historians have adopted scientific methodologies to investigate the history of law. One of the most important treatments of history, case study, and scientific method is Lawrence Friedman and Robert Percival\u27s (1981) study, Roots of Justice: Crime and Punishment in Alameda County, California, 1870-1910. These authors accumulated massive amounts of data from many sources, including appellate court records, prison log books, arrest blotters, felony case files, court registers, and newspapers. Plowing new ground necessitated that the authors provide notes on methodology and sources. Another attempt at applying social science method to legal history and regional studies is John Wunder\u27s (1979) study, Inferior Courts, Superior Justice: A History of the Justices of the Peace on the Northwest Frontier, 18531889. Manuscript records, newspapers, journals, diaries, and over 1400 justice court cases for a 36-year period were collected. Seventeen variables were isolated to determine the quality of justice, from which four factors contributing to a superior quality of justice were identified. They included an assessment of accessibility to the courts for frontier residents, adjudication celerity, the level of community acceptance of court decisions, and the amount of training received by JPs. Court costs were computed, average time for court decisions were tabulated, and attorney and jury actions were evaluated

Review of \u3ci\u3eOur Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen\u3c/i\u3e by Joe Drape

The best book on Great Plains sports is H. G. Bissinger\u27s Friday Night Lights (1990). That classic has spawned a critically acclaimed television series and numerous awards. FNL not only told the story of a football season at Odessa Permian High School in urban West Texas; it also asked and answered some very big questions that concerned high school athletic corruption, coaching pressures, cheerleader/ football player interaction, school integration, local community politics, treatment of players of color, Texas\u27s new rules prohibiting playing with failing grades, pressures on teachers, drugs, player abuse, and on and on. It remains a beautifully written and crafted expose. Our Boys is not Friday Night Lights. The location and subject are comparable: a season with a Great Plains football community with a winning tradition. Smith Center, Kansas, county seat of Smith County situated in northwest Kansas near the Nebraska border, is a small community of 1,931 hardy Kansans. Note that Odessa, Texas, has a population of 90,000 plus-a significant difference, but the passions in Odessa and Smith Center seem quite similar. Many of the Smith County residents are farmers and make use of the hotly contested Republican River waters for irrigation. Farmers, whom Ag schools term producers, produce grains and beef for regional and national markets; Smith Center High School produces football players, occasionally for Kansas State University and more often for regional four-year colleges

Mari Sandoz and Her 1956 Fifty-Year Predictions

Wintertime 1956 in New York City for Mari Sandoz was a time of reassessment. She had been thinking about a commitment she made, and it was time to meet it. She had agreed to compose predictions about American life for the next fifty years (from 1957 to 2007) that along with at least 57 others would be placed in a time capsule and stored in the cornerstone of the building that housed KETV in downtown Omaha. Sandoz typed up her predictions on her typewriter in her relatively new apartment and entitled the five double-spaced pages December, 2006 A.D. and sent it off. The time capsule was to be opened and shared with the public in the next century in 2007 and without much fanfare, the capsule was dug out and made available. Of course, Sandoz kept copies of her predictions, and they can be found today in the Sandoz Archives at Chadron State College. This brief paper encapsulates two aspects of this event, examining the context in which Sandoz created her predictions and exploring the predicitions themselves

Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1854-1858

Bleeding Kansas in the Newspapers The state of “state history today is a sorry one except for a few. Too many history departments at major universities have decided that state history is not a particular specialty they wish to continue with faculty investment. They have forgotten tha...

Age-of-Information in Clocked Networks

We derive key features of the Age-of-Information distribution in a system whose activities are strictly limited to periodic instances on a global time grid. In particular, one agent periodically generates updates while the other agent periodically uses the most recently received of those updates. Likewise, transmission of those updates over a network can only occur periodically. All periods may differ. We derive results for two different models: a basic one in which the mathematical problems can be handled directly and an extended model which, among others, can also account for stochastic transmission failure, making the results applicable to instances with wireless communication. For both models, a suitable approximation for the expected Age-of-Information and an upper bound for its largest occurring value are developed. For the extended model (which is the more relevant one from a practical standpoint) we also present numerical results for the distribution of the approximation error for numerous parameter choices

Nitrate Poisoning in Swine

On July 23, 1959, a call was received from a client Wll0 reported that his hogs were sick. Upon arrival at the client\u27s farm, two dead pigs were found. Three other pigs were weak and when forced to move, did so at a staggering gait. These pigs were examined. The temperatures ranged from 101.5° to 102.7,° well within the normal range. Olle pig was noted to be breathing rather rapidly and evidence of a watery diarrhea was noted on all of the affected pigs. One of the pigs was unable to rise. A slight dilation of the pupils was noted

Concentrations of leptin and C-reactive protein in serum and follicular fluid during assisted reproductive cycles

BACKGROUND: There are only a few studies that have investigated inflammatory processes during ovarian hyperstimulation, with contradictory results especially concerning outcome. The aim of the study was to investigate the inflammatory markers C-reactive protein and leptin in serum and follicular fluid and to correlate these with the outcome. METHODS: One hundred and sixty-two gonadotrophin stimulated cycles were evaluated. Serum concentrations of leptin and C-reactive protein were measured at the initiation of stimulation, on the day of hCG administration or the day before, and on the day of oocyte retrieval. They were also determined in the follicular fluid. RESULTS: Serum leptin and C-reactive protein levels increased significantly during stimulation until the day of oocyte pick up, but following different patterns. After stimulation, they correlated with each other in serum and follicular fluid, but not with estradiol or progesterone concentration, embryo quality, or the pregnancy rate. CONCLUSIONS: Leptin and C-reactive protein levels change significantly during assisted reproductive treatment. In contrast to estradiol they are, however, not a marker of succes

Hope for Bohemian ecologists – comments on “A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists?” by Tomáš Grim, Oikos 2008

No abstract available