Rural Broadband Internet Access Supply and Demand

Internet use has grown rapidly over the last 15 years and so has its integration into the rural economy. Connecting to the Internet via high-speed technology such as DSL lines, cable, satellite, and wireless networks increases bandwidth and makes the Internet much more useful to businesses, households, and governments. Rural households are almost as likely as urban households to use the Internet. Broadband Internet access in rural areas has been less prevalent than in much more densely populated areas of the country. Evidence suggests that the difference may lie in the higher cost or less availability of broadband Internet access in rural areas. The paucity of national geographically-specific data, however, presents a challenge in trying to analyze questions of broadband take-up. Data from the June Agricultural Surveys, however, address this. The other difficulty has been obtaining local price in demand analysis. We use ARMS and industry data to develop local broadband service price indices. We use descriptive statistics and binomial logit models in our analysis. The data shows sharp differences in conversion rates across the country, and when also considering the changes over time giving some credence to the common hypothesis that people do choose to use broadband if given the option. Farms were unlikely to make the direct jump from no Internet use to Internet use with broadband access; farms that already had Internet access were more likely to convert to broadband Internet access. Some of the farms that did not convert already had broadband Internet access by 2005, roughly 24 percent of all farms using the Internet in 2005. The preponderance of DSL service for farms indicates both the mostly rural location of most farms as well as Internet users finding satellite a less desirable option. While broadband Internet access availability is necessary for take-up of broadband Internet access, there are other factors that are also limiting broadband Internet use such as price of access, age of user, household income, and educational attainment.broadband Internet access, rural communities, farm communities, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, O33, R0,

Liberation Theology and Liberatory Pedagogies: Renewing the Dialogue

recent Chronicle of Higher Education column, Stanley Fish describes a phone call he received after the death of Jacques Derrida from a reporter who was curious as to what would succeed high theory as the center of energy in the academy. I answered like a shot, Fish writes, religion (1). For many, Fish\u27s prophecy might create a feeling of uneasiness; after all, in academic culture, religious ideologies are often considered hindrances to-not vehicles for-critical thought. This feeling may be especially true in regard to Christianity, which is often conflated with conservative politics and fundamentalism both in and outside of the academy. But those of us who espouse critical pedagogy and embrace Paulo Freire\u27s visions of praxis and conscientization work out of a tradition, often unknowingly, with deep ties to religious faith

Disperse—a software system for design of selector probes for exon resequencing applications

Summary:Selector probes enable the amplification of many selected regions of the genome in multiplex. Disperse is a software pipeline that automates the procedure of designing selector probes for exon resequencing applications

Developing Pedagogies: Learning the Teaching of English

Consider the following scenario: You arrive at graduate school in time for the three-day orientation, which consists of a series of workshop training to be a scholar. One half-day session covers the conference proposal and presentation; another trains new students to write seminar papers; a third focuses on the prospectus and dissertation; yet another teaches the composition articles for refereed journals. At the end of three days, you are ostensibly trained in the basics required to contribute to your profession as a scholar and researcher. While you might continue to develop these skills as you advance through exams, dissertations, and professional forums, your program can rest assured that it has done its duty by you, having covered the fundamentals and thereby orienting you

Use of near infrared reflectance spectroscopy to predict nitrogen uptake by winter wheat within fields with high variability in organic matter

In this study, the ability to predict N-uptake in winter wheat crops using NIR-spectroscopy on soil samples was evaluated. Soil samples were taken in unfertilized plots in one winter wheat field during three years (1997-1999) and in another winter wheat field nearby in one year (2000). Soil samples were analyzed for organic C content and their NIR-spectra. N-uptake was measured as total N-content in aboveground plant materials at harvest. Models calibrated to predict N-uptake were internally cross validated and validated across years and across fields. Cross-validated calibrations predicted N-uptake with an average error of 12.1 to 15.4 kg N ha-1. The standard deviation divided by this error (RPD) ranged between 1.9 and 2.5. In comparison, the corresponding calibrations based on organic C alone had an error from 11.7 to 28.2 kg N ha-1 and RPDs from 1.3 to 2.5. In three of four annual calibrations within a field, the NIR-based calibrations worked better than the organic C based calibrations. The prediction of N-uptake across years, but within a field, worked slightly better with an organic C based calibration than with a NIR based one, RPD = 1.9 and 1.7 respectively. Across fields, the corresponding difference was large in favour of the NIR-calibration, RPD = 2.5 for the NIR-calibration and 1.5 for the organic C calibration. It was concluded that NIR-spectroscopy integrates information about organic C with other relevant soil components and therefore has a good potential to predict complex functions of soils such as N-mineralization. A relatively good agreement of spectral relationships to parameters related to the N-mineralization of datasets across the world suggests that more general models can be calibrated

“Always Up Against”: A Study of Veteran WPAs and Social Resilience

This essay reports on an interview-based study of ten veteran WPAs, whose three decades of service spans neoliberalism’s growing influence on universities. Our findings trace their enactment of social resilience, a dynamic, relational process that allowed them, even in the face of constraint, to act and to preserve key commitments. Like most compositionists, and especially WPAs, we feel the restrictive impact of austerity. This sense is reflected in a growing body of research in our field, and most recently in a CCC special issue, where Jonathan Alexander reminds us that “one of the things we know about writing and the teaching of writing . . . is that they are shaped by economic forces” (Alexander 7; see also Welch and Scott; Comstock et al.; Stenberg). Historically tight budgets are now tighter. Arguments to fund writing instruction must be couched in terms of initiatives like “the Chancellor’s Goals” or “innovation for success” and articulated in the context of tuition revenue, markets, student- (or consumer-) “friendliness.” Funding for existing programs that benefit students and teachers alike, such as the writing center, is difficult to secure when it doesn’t offer the shine of a new initiative or the potential for external grant acquisition. Writing instructors and WPAs must navigate the impact of neoliberal pressures that privilege efficiency and austerity, evident in institutional calls for increased enrollments, accelerated degreecompletion rates, ease of transfer, and reduced instructional cost

Chaos Is the Poetry: From Outcomes to Inquiry in Service-Learning Pedagogy

It is no secret that the contemporary university values a model of efficiency, of tangible, quantifiable outcomes. Jan Currie and Lesley Vidovich (qtd. in Downing, Hurlbert, Mathieu 9) contend that since the 1980s, the boundaries between higher education, government, and business have largely deteriorated, and business discourse of excellence has come to dominate university culture. Consequently, output, outcomes, and efficiency are valorized over and above process, inquiry, and the inevitable tensions of learning. Stanley Aronowitz puts it this way: [A]cademic leaders chant the mantra of excellence . . . [which] means ... all parts of the university \u27perform\u27 and are judged according to how well they deliver knowledge and qualified labor to the corporate (158). More- over, according to David Downing, Claude Mark Hurlbert, and Paula Mathieu, administrators tend to promote short-term, external signs of success, such as rankings, rather than . . . long-term educational and social value (10)

“2+2+2” COLLABORATION ADDS UP TO SUCCESS FOR AMERICAN INDIAN STUDENTS

Various governmental, political and community leaders have called for a model which fosters collabo¬ration between high schools, tribal colleges and state universities which will help Native students over¬come barriers and complete their higher education. South Dakota\u27s 2+2+2 program provides such a model

Adaptation of the yeast gene knockout collection is near-perfectly predicted by fitness and diminishing return epistasis

Adaptive evolution of clonally dividing cells and microbes is the ultimate cause of cancer and infectious diseases. The possibility of constraining the adaptation of cell populations, by inhibiting proteins enhancing the evolvability, has therefore attracted interest. However, our current understanding of how genes influence adaptation kinetics is limited, partly because accurately measuring adaptation for many cell populations is challenging. We used a high-throughput adaptive laboratory evolution platform to track the adaptation of >18,000 cell populations corresponding to single-gene deletion strains in the haploid yeast deletion collection. We report that the preadaptation fitness of gene knockouts near-perfectly (R-2= 0.91) predicts their adaptation to arsenic, leaving at the most a marginal role for dedicated evolvability gene functions. We tracked the adaptation of another >23,000 gene knockout populations to a diverse range of selection pressures and generalized the almost perfect (R-2=0.72-0.98) capacity of preadaptation fitness to predict adaptation. We also reconstructed mutations in FPS1, ASK10, and ARR3, which together account for almost all arsenic adaptation in wild-type cells, in gene deletions covering a broad fitness range and show that the predictability of arsenic adaptation can be understood as a by global epistasis, where excluding arsenic is more beneficial to arsenic unfit cells. The paucity of genes with a meaningful evolvability effect on adaptation diminishes the prospects of developing adjuvant drugs aiming to slow antimicrobial and chemotherapy resistance