OFF-FARM INCOME OF PEOPLE INVOLVED IN FARMING

Labor and Human Capital,

TOWARD A MORE COMPLETE COMPARISON OF FARM AND NONFARM PROPRIETORSHIP INCOME

Farm Management,

A Continuum of Care: School Librarian Interventions for New Teacher Resilience

School librarians occupy a unique position to offer supports for first year teachers to build resilience, reduce burnout, and ensure retention. The researcher used the psychology theory of resilience to develop the Continuum of Care model which initiates in mentoring and moves toward a collaborative partnership. Fifteen school librarians in one urban district recruited 26 new teachers in their schools to form the treatment group. All new teachers in the district were surveyed to establish their initial level of resilience and collect demographics. A comparison group of 26 new teachers were matched by scores on a resilience scale at the start of the school year, by school level and by Title I status of the school. The treatment group received interventions using the Continuum of Care model over the course of the following four months. Post-treatment, the comparison group and treatment group were surveyed for level of resilience, burnout, and retention. ANOVA was used to find change in resilience over time for the treatment group. ANCOVA was used to compare resilience and burnout scores for the comparison and treatment groups. Binary logistic regression was used to compare retention of the comparison and treatment groups. Interviews of three school librarian-new teacher pairs brought forth the lived experiences of participants. Findings show that new teachers in the treatment group received significantly higher levels of mentoring and collaboration than new teachers in the comparison group. There was a significant effect for the interaction between level of resilience for the treatment group and age. School librarians and new teachers valued their relationship and voiced the effect on resilience, burnout, and retention. Reaching out to new teachers to bridge the gap between the library and classroom may be considered as best practice for school librarians. This exploratory research study laid the groundwork for further study of the role of the school librarian to support new teacher resilience in the authentic school setting

The Role of Adult Fiddler Crab Environmental Acoustic Cues and Chemical Cues in Stimulating Molting of Field-Caught Megalopae

In mid-Atlantic estuaries, three fiddler crab species, Uca pugilator, Uca pugnax and Uca minax co-occur, with their adults occupying different habitat types distinguished by salinity and sediment size. Some evidence exists that selective settlement is responsible for this separation but the mechanism is largely unknown. We tested the hypothesis that field-caught megalopae would accelerate metamorphosis in the presence of adult species-specific environmental acoustic cues and conspecific chemical cues. We placed megalopae in seawater with and without adult chemical cues, exposed them to one of three sound treatments for 8 days, and recorded the time each megalopa took to metamorphose. In the absence of adult chemical cues, very few megalopae molted regardless of sound treatment. Molting in the presence of habitat sound and chemical cues varied by species. Many U. pugilator molted in all sound and odor combinations, including no odor/sound. U. pugnax was stimulated to molt by chemical cues from either U. pugilator or U. pugnax, but molting was similar across sound treatments. Our results do not support the hypothesis that sound stimulates molting by fiddler crab megalopae, but support the role of chemical odors from adults as molting cues

Dispersal Dynamics of the Bivalve Gemma Gemma in a Patchy Environment

The purpose of this study was to analyze the dispersal dynamics of the ovoviviparous bivalve Gemma gemma (hereafter referred to as Gemma) in an environment disturbed by the pit-digging activities of horseshoe crabs, Limulus polyphemus. Gemma broods its young and has no planktonic larval stage, so all dispersal is the result of juvenile and adult movement. Animal movement was measured using natural crab pits, hand-dug simulated crab pits, and cylindrical bottom traps in the intertidal zone at Tom\u27s Cove, Virginia, USA. This study demonstrated that horseshoe crabs create localized patches with reduced densities of Gemma, that all sizes and ages of Gemma quickly disperse into these low density patches, and that the mechanism of dispersal is passive bedload and suspended load transport. Freshly excavated natural pits had significantly lower Gemma densities than did undisturbed background sediment, but there were no significant differences in total density of other species, number of species, and species diversity (H\u27). Equitability (J\u27) was greater in pits than in controls because of the reduced abundance of Gemma, the numerically dominant species. Newly dug simulated crab pits also had significantly lower Gemma densities than controls and returned to control levels by the next day. Density recovery trajectories for individually marked pits showed consistent responses in summer and fall, but not in winter when low Gemma abundance resulted in greater variability among pits. Significant positive correlations between the volume of sediment and the number of Gemma collected per bottom trap support the hypothesis that Gemma dispersal is a passive transport phenomenon. Assuming no active, density-dependent movement, the product of the Gemma density frequency distribution in undisturbed background sediment and the frequency distribution of sediment volume collected per trap created a predicted Gemma frequency distribution in traps that matched the actual distribution. Absolute dispersal rates and relative dispersal rates (absolute dispersal rate divided by background density in undisturbed sediment) into pits and traps were greater in summer than winter. Dispersal rate results suggest that increased horseshoe crab disturbance in summer may cause an increase in Gemma transport. Because Gemma individuals are dispersed by hydrodynamic action, it was expected that small, young individuals would be most easily transported in the bedload. There was, however, little evidence that movement into pits and traps was size- or age-selective. Most recent benthic dispersal research has focused on the large-scale movement and settlement patterns of invertebrate larvae. The results from this study illustrate that dispersal of bottom-dwelling juveniles and adults plays an important role in regulating the local distribution and abundance of Gemma. Previous workers have shown that young Gemma live in dense aggregations and that growth and fecundity are reduced at such high densities, leading to population crashes. This study demonstrated a mechanism by which Gemma disperses into low-density patches where intraspecific competition may be mitigated, possibly resulting in enhanced individual reproductive success and population fitness

Rank penalized estimation of a quantum system

We introduce a new method to reconstruct the density matrix $\rho$ of a system of $n$-qubits and estimate its rank $d$ from data obtained by quantum state tomography measurements repeated $m$ times. The procedure consists in minimizing the risk of a linear estimator $\hat{\rho}$ of $\rho$ penalized by given rank (from 1 to $2^n$), where $\hat{\rho}$ is previously obtained by the moment method. We obtain simultaneously an estimator of the rank and the resulting density matrix associated to this rank. We establish an upper bound for the error of penalized estimator, evaluated with the Frobenius norm, which is of order $dn(4/3)^n /m$ and consistency for the estimator of the rank. The proposed methodology is computationaly efficient and is illustrated with some example states and real experimental data sets

Building Resilience in New and Beginning Teachers: Contributions of School Librarians

Building beginning teachers\u27 resilience may contribute to increasing teacher retention in the early years, in turn improving student academic achievement. School librarians contribute to developing teaching skills by mentoring new teachers. This qualitative study of first to third year teachers and school librarians investigated the contributions that school librarians made in building resilience of beginning teachers through a focus group of new teachers and interviews of school librarians. Findings show that school librarians may contribute to early career teacher resilience, especially during the first days of school, by encouraging perseverance, providing nourishment and empathy, and offering the library as a resource, especially for researc

Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects in Nineteenth-century Haiti

This dissertation examines the largely dismissed nineteenth-century tradition of Romantic poetry in Haiti from the 1830s to the 1890s. I synthesize the conclusions of various studies prompted by the 2004 Haitian bicentennial in order to challenge the claims that nineteenth-century Haitian poems are banal parodies of French texts and simple preludes to twentieth-century Haiti literature. I argue that imitation becomes an impossible label with which to understand the complexities of Haitian poetry and national sentiment. Considering Haiti's ambiguous relationship to modernity and the clairvoyance with which Haitian poets expressed national concerns, Haitian poetry constitutes a deliberate practice in the construction, legitimization and expression of national identity. In each of the three chapters I rely on historical context in order to situate the poetry and examine it through textual analysis. I explore in an initial chapter how political changes in Haiti in the 1820s, along with recognition of independence from France, coincided with the subsequent birth of Haitian Romanticism in the 1830s. The poetry of Coriolan Ardouin and Ignace Nau documents the development of poetic subjectivity and the inaugurating of national history which make this a pivotal period in Haitian poetry. A second chapter focuses on Haiti's most prolific nineteenth-century poet, Oswald Durand, whose collection Rires et Pleurs includes poetry from the 1860s through the 1880s. Haitian theories of racial equality are expressed in Durand's corpus and set within the thematic and aesthetic norms of French Romanticism, but the effort to inscribe a national and racial specificity enriches as much as it complicates his poetic project. In the final chapter, I document the shift that occurs for the last Haitian Romantic poet, Massillon Coicou. In his 1892 collection Poésies Nationales, the confident project of asserting national identity gives way to the sense of national failure due to an increasingly triumphant imperialism and internal corruption. On the eve of the Haitian centennial, Coicou's verse demonstrates the ways in which political crisis in Haiti are inherently tied to the notion of poetry. He ultimately turns to political activism, and his assassination in 1908 symbolizes the demise of poetry as a viable, national project

Directed network of substorms using SuperMAG ground‐based magnetometer data

We quantify the spatio‐temporal evolution of the substorm ionospheric current system utilizing the SuperMAG 100+ magnetometers. We construct dynamical directed networks from this data for the first time. If the canonical cross‐correlation (CCC) between vector magnetic field perturbations observed at two magnetometer stations exceeds a threshold, they form a network connection. The time lag at which CCC is maximal determines the direction of propagation or expansion of the structure captured by the network connection. If spatial correlation reflects ionospheric current patterns, network properties can test different models for the evolving substorm current system. We select 86 isolated substorms based on nightside ground station coverage. We find, and obtain the timings for, a consistent picture in which the classic substorm current wedge (SCW) forms. A current system is seen pre‐midnight following the SCW westward expansion. Later, there is a weaker signal of eastward expansion. Finally, there is evidence of substorm‐enhanced convection