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

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

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

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...

Tributes to Rick Edwards upon His Retirement

I understand that you will be retiring from UNL in August. I wanted to express my sadness that you will be leaving the Center for Great Plains Studies, but am glad that you will now be able to perhaps enjoy life even more without having to do the administrative tasks that go with being the director of any organization. (RFD

Prophylactic antibiotic regimens in tumour surgery (PARITY): protocol for a multicentre randomised controlled study.

IntroductionLimb salvage with endoprosthetic reconstruction is the standard of care for the management of lower-extremity bone tumours in skeletally mature patients. The risk of deep postoperative infection in these procedures is high and the outcomes can be devastating. The most effective prophylactic antibiotic regimen remains unknown, and current clinical practice is highly varied. This trial will evaluate the effect of varying postoperative prophylactic antibiotic regimens on the incidence of deep infection following surgical excision and endoprosthetic reconstruction of lower-extremity bone tumours.Methods and analysisThis is a multicentre, blinded, randomised controlled trial, using a parallel two-arm design. 920 patients 15 years of age or older from 12 tertiary care centres across Canada and the USA who are undergoing surgical excision and endoprosthetic reconstruction of a primary bone tumour will receive either short (24 h) or long (5 days) duration postoperative antibiotics. Exclusion criteria include prior surgery or infection within the planned operative field, known colonisation with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus at enrolment, or allergy to the study antibiotics. The primary outcome will be rates of deep postoperative infections in each arm. Secondary outcomes will include type and frequency of antibiotic-related adverse events, patient functional outcomes and quality-of-life scores, reoperation and mortality. Randomisation will be blocked, with block sizes known only to the methods centre responsible for randomisation, and stratified by location of tumour and study centre. Patients, care givers and a Central Adjudication Committee will be blinded to treatment allocation. The analysis to compare groups will be performed using Cox regression and log-rank tests to compare survival functions at α=0.05.Ethics and disseminationThis study has ethics approval from the McMaster University/Hamilton Health Sciences Research Ethics Board (REB# 12-009). Successful completion will significantly impact on clinical practice and enhance patients' lives. More broadly, this trial will develop a network of collaboration from which further high-quality trials in Orthopaedic Oncology will follow

Immuno-transcriptomic profiling of extracranial pediatric solid malignancies.

We perform an immunogenomics analysis utilizing whole-transcriptome sequencing of 657 pediatric extracranial solid cancer samples representing 14 diagnoses, and additionally utilize transcriptomes of 131 pediatric cancer cell lines and 147 normal tissue samples for comparison. We describe patterns of infiltrating immune cells, T cell receptor (TCR) clonal expansion, and translationally relevant immune checkpoints. We find that tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and TCR counts vary widely across cancer types and within each diagnosis, and notably are significantly predictive of survival in osteosarcoma patients. We identify potential cancer-specific immunotherapeutic targets for adoptive cell therapies including cell-surface proteins, tumor germline antigens, and lineage-specific transcription factors. Using an orthogonal immunopeptidomics approach, we find several potential immunotherapeutic targets in osteosarcoma and Ewing sarcoma and validated PRAME as a bona fide multi-pediatric cancer target. Importantly, this work provides a critical framework for immune targeting of extracranial solid tumors using parallel immuno-transcriptomic and -peptidomic approaches