HOW THE CLIMATE OF OPINION IN STATES AND COUNTRIES INFLUENCES GAY RIGHTS

This dissertation examines attitudes on same-sex marriage and how personal predispositions toward support and the climate of opinion interact to help create attitudes. Over the past few decades, support for gay rights has increased dramatically in the United States and many other countries around the world. I argue that, while the set of basic personal determinants of attitudes toward homosexuality and gay rights stays roughly the same, the impact of such determinants changes over time and space. The framework used in this dissertation draws on attitudinal and political psychology, political sociology and theories of contextual effects. I argue that over the course of their lives, people develop an overall propensity to tolerate or approve of homosexuality and support gay rights based on their political and social characteristics, such as religiosity, partisan or ideological identities, personality characteristics and various demographic characteristics (e.g., education, race, gender and age). The influence of these predispositions on gay rights attitudes is moderated by the political and social environments in which people live. Even among people whose predispositions push them consistently toward support for gay rights, if they live in a homophobic environment, support for gay rights will be attenuated compared to a similar individual living in a more socially tolerant environment

Completed at Calvary: An Examination of the Extent of the Atonement

Calvinism\u27s limited atonement is the pillar that has been notorious for being the weak link in the Calvinists\u27 theological system (TULIP). This paper purposed to delve into the legitimacy of their argument, using the popular penal theory as the foundation for determining the extent of the atonement. Here Christ\u27s sacrifice is seen as the act accomplishing such things as reconciliation and redemption, instead of merely providing potentials effectual upon faith, for all those to whom the atonement extends. Three problematic texts were examined and dealt with, maintaining consistency theologically. From the basis of the penal view, both universal salvation and particular redemption logically follow, depending on whether Christ died for all or some. Since universalism is not a valid evangelical doctrine it was discarded, leaving particular redemption as the sole conclusion of the penal theory

A META ANALYSIS OF CONTINGENT VALUES FOR GROUNDWATER QUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES

This paper provides an overview and a meta analysis of existing US contingent valuation studies of groundwater quality. Using 108 observations from 14 studies, core economic variables, risk variables, and elicitation effects are found to systematically influence groundwater values. Other research design features are also investigated.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Simple Computational Methods for Measuring the Difference of Empirical Distributions: Application to Internal and External Scope Tests in Contingent Valuation

This paper develops a statistically unbiased and simple method for measuring the difference of independent empirical distributions estimated by bootstrapping or other simulation approaches. This complete combinatorial method is compared with other unbiased and biased methods that have been suggested in the literature, first in Monte Carlo simulations and then in a field test of external and internal scope testing in contingent valuation. Tradeoffs between methods are discussed. When the empirical distributions are not independent a straightforward difference test is suggested.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Thin and lumpy: an experimental investigation of water quality trading

Water quality trading schemes in the United States can predominantly be characterized by low trading volumes. In this paper we utilize laboratory economics experiments to explore the extent to which the technology through which pollution abatement is achieved influences market outcomes. Mirroring the majority of water quality trading markets, the sessions utilize small trading groups composed of six participants. To understand the extent to which abatement technology influences trading behavior, the experimental treatments vary the degree of heterogeneity in initial abatement costs and the potential for long-lived investments in cost-reducing abatement technology.Environmental Economics and Policy,

The "Illimitable Dominion" of Charles Dickens: Transatlantic Print Culture and the Spring of 1842

This article explores Edgar Allan Poe’s May 1842 edition of Graham’s Monthly Magazine in the context of debates about international copyright circulating in the press at the time of Charles Dickens’s famous tour of the US. I offer a reading of Poe’s short story ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, and his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales that sees these texts as interventions in transatlantic debates at the forefront of the public imagination in the Spring of 1842. In particular, through an original close reading of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ I demonstrate how Poe subtly drew upon penny press exposés to inform the short story’s discussion of class, status and rights of access. I also suggest that the argument Poe made in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne about the importance of ‘invention, creation, imagination [and] originality’ to the ‘prose tale’ is usefully considered in the same context, as an American response to questions of authorship that were also raised by the popular hysteria surrounding Dickens

New Voices: Interactive CD-ROMs for Library Instruction and Discovering a Research Agenda

This paper describes the development of an instruction/orientation platform that teaches students, specifically the distance education students, at our university how to access, navigate, and understand the services and resources available to them via the university library. However, there is another purpose to this paper that the authors believe to be just as valuable to other “new voices” in our profession. To that end, this paper examines how two new librarians attempted to better serve their patrons. But it also looks at how, through the instruction project’s development, two new academic librarians discovered that one lone project could benefit the academic and professional development of their careers as they worked toward tenure and promotion – helping them to find and define their “voice” so to speak

Culpability and Willingness to Pay to Reduce Negative Externalities: A Contingent Valuation and Experimental Economics Study

Financial Economics,

Interface-Lift: The Houston Cole Library\u27s Web Page Redesign Project

A discussion of the redesign of the web site for the Houston Cole Library at Jacksonville State University. Faculty and student input were taken and the results used to shape the direction of the project