Farm Aid: a Case Study of a Charity Rock Organization

This study examines the impact that the non-profit organization Farm Aid has had on the farming industry, policy, and the concert realm known as charity rock. This study also examines how the organization has maintained its longevity. By conducting an evaluation on Farm Aid and its history, the organization’s messaging and means to communicate, a detailed analysis of the past media coverage on Farm Aid from 1985-2010, and a phone interview with Executive Director Carolyn Mugar, I have determined that Farm Aid’s impact is complex and not clear. Farm Aid, while very active in the political sphere, including lobbying for certain reforms, has not had a direct impact on policy. Furthermore, this study has shown that Farm Aid has been able to maintain its longevity by changing its messaging and mode of communication as well as aligning itself with a shift in food culture that promotes healthy food. Lastly, I will show how Farm Aid is an example of a successful charity rock organization that has raised both awareness and money without achieving the main goal: altering policy

Debating the Causes of the Civil War

Histor

U.S. Foreign Trade Policy from the Revolution to World War I

This is the final version of the article. Available from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this record.Economic nationalist trade policies tended to dominate the long nineteenth century—stretching from the end of the American Revolution to the beginning of the First World War—owing to the pervasive U.S. sense of economic and geopolitical insecurity because of a fear of hostile powers, be they French, Spanish, the Barbary States, and especially the British. Following the U.S. Civil War, leading U.S. protectionist politicians sought to curtail European trade policies and to create a U.S.-dominated customs union in the Western Hemisphere. American proponents of trade liberalization increasingly found themselves outnumbered in the halls of Congress, as the “American System” of economic nationalism grew in popularity alongside the perceived need for foreign markets. Protectionist advocates in the United States viewed the American System as a panacea that promised to not only provide the federal government with revenue but also to artificially insulate American infant industries from undue foreign market competition through high protective tariffs and subsidies, and to retaliate against real and perceived threats to U.S. trade. Throughout this period, the United States underwent a great struggle over the course its foreign trade policy should take. By the late nineteenth century, the era’s boom-and-bust global economic system led to a growing perception that the United States needed more access to foreign markets as an outlet for the country’s surplus goods and capital. But whether the United States would obtain foreign market access through free trade or protectionism led to a great debate over the proper course of U.S. foreign trade policy. By the time that the United States acquired a colonial empire from the Spanish in 1898, this same debate over U.S. foreign trade policy had effectively merged into debates over the course of U.S. imperial expansion. The country’s more expansionist-minded economic nationalists came out on top. The overwhelming 1896 victory of William McKinley—the Republican party’s “Napoleon of Protection”—marked the beginning of substantial expansion of U.S. foreign trade through a mixture of protectionism and imperialism in the years leading up to the First World War

Transimperial Roots of American Anti-Imperialism: The Transatlantic Radicalism of Free Trade, 1846-1920

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available in print from Duke University Press.This chapter addresses the long-neglected economic cosmopolitan motivations of American anti-imperialists from the Civil War Era to the end of the First World War. It argues that the Anti-Imperialist League (AIL, 1898-1920) leadership’s widespread subscription to free-trade ideas, emanating from the metropolitan heart of the British Empire, underpinned their anti-imperial moralism. The British-born free-trade ideas of the 1830s and 1840s conditioned the institutions and ideas of American anti-imperialism from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, when the U.S. imperial project came to encompass large swaths of the Caribbean and the Asia-Pacific formerly under the sway of the Spanish Empire. Businessmen and nationalists in the former Spanish colonies, desiring to control their own tariff policies and to have free access to the U.S. market, thereupon embodied the broader anti-imperialist critique of U.S. protectionist imperialism. The AIL’s anti-imperialism of free trade, intersecting as it did with the British, Spanish, and U.S. empires, must therefore be understood as a transimperial phenomenon

Distant Music

Poem

Considerations for Evaluating Evolving Organizations and Initiatives

Background: Evaluators are often called to be flexible in response to changing programmatic and contextual circumstances. However, the field offers little guidance around issues to consider before modifying an in-progress evaluation. Purpose: This article describes the evaluation of an organization that underwent significant mid-evaluation changes, with a focus on factors that went into the evaluator’s recommendations about whether to modify evaluation design and instrumentation. Setting: Community collaborative in Wake County, North Carolina Intervention: NA Research Design: NA Data Collection and Analysis: The evaluator noted factors that went in to decisions about modifying evaluation design and instrumentation. Findings: Issues around validity and sustainability push evaluators to update our evaluation designs to keep pace with changes, whereas issues around continuity and accountability pull us to back to the current course

Research Agenda in Intelligent Infrastructure to Enhance Disaster Management, Community Resilience and Public Safety

Modern societies can be understood as the intersection of four interdependent systems: (1) the natural environment of geography, climate and weather; (2) the built environment of cities, engineered systems, and physical infrastructure; (3) the social environment of human populations, communities and socio-economic activities; and (4) an information ecosystem that overlays the other three domains and provides the means for understanding, interacting with, and managing the relationships between the natural, built, and human environments. As the nation and its communities become more connected, networked and technologically sophisticated, new challenges and opportunities arise that demand a rethinking of current approaches to public safety and emergency management. Addressing the current and future challenges requires an equally sophisticated program of research, technology development, and strategic planning. The design and integration of intelligent infrastructure-including embedded sensors, the Internet of Things (IoT), advanced wireless information technologies, real-time data capture and analysis, and machine-learning-based decision support-holds the potential to greatly enhance public safety, emergency management, disaster recovery, and overall community resilience, while addressing new and emerging threats to public safety and security. Ultimately, the objective of this program of research and development is to save lives, reduce risk and disaster impacts, permit efficient use of material and social resources, and protect quality of life and economic stability across entire regions.Comment: A Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper, 4 page

Synthesis and characterisation of molecular nanostructures

In this thesis, bulk and local scale spectroscopic and microscopic tools have been applied to investigate the purified raw material of SWCNT and synthesized MWBNNT, BN-nanocapsules, B-doped SWCNT and SiC nanostructures. Using bulk scale sensitive techniques, including optical absorption spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, high-resolution electron energy-loss spectroscopy, the average response of the whole sample is obtained. On the other hand, on a local scale transmission and scanning electron microscopy as well as TEM-electron energy-loss spectroscopy provide information on single tubes or other nanostructures. First, diverse chemical and oxidation methods for the purification of as-produced SWCNT were presented. Purified samples were investigated using TEM and OAS. The analysis of the optical absorption spectra in the UV-Vis energy range revealed that some of the chemical treatments are harmful to nanotubes. In contrast to the chemical treatments an oxygen burning procedure was used on the raw material in high vacuum and a temperature range 450?650oC. The purification processes of SWCNT by HNO3 and oxygen burning procedures resulted in SWCNT comprised of selected diameters and a reduced diameter distribution. Both HNO3 and oxygen burning treatments can be used to selectively remove SWCNT with smaller diameters from the samples. In addition, an adapted substitution reaction was used for the synthesis of multiwall boron nitride nanotubes. It was shown that the IR-response of MWBNNT can be used as a fingerprint to analyse MWBNNT. As in h-BN for the analysis one has to be aware of the sample texture and the LO-TO splitting of the IR-active modes. TEM images and B1s and N 1s excitation edges of the grown material reveal the presence of multiwall BN nanotubes with an inner diameter of 3.1 nm and with a larger interplanar distance than in h-BN. The electronic properties of the multiwall BN nanotubes as derived from the q-dependent dielectric function e(w,q) are dominated by the band structure of the hexagonal-like BN sheets, as revealed by the large degree of momentum dispersion observed for the p and s+p plasmons, in agreement with that previously reported for different graphitic allotropic forms. Moreover, a fast and highly efficient synthesis route to produce BN nanocapsules with a narrow size distribution was developed. This was achieved by an adapted substitution process using SWCNT as templates followed by a rapid cooling treatment. The IR responses reveal the strong dipole active fingerprint lines of h-BN with distinct differences, which are due to texturing effects and which highlight the BN nanocapsules potential application as a reference source when deriving the sp2 to sp3 ratio in BN species due to their random orientation Furthermore, the idea of substitution was used for the systematic studies of B-doped SWCNT. The experiments carried out have resulted in 1, 5, 10, and 15 % boron incorporated into the single wall carbon nanotubes. Core level excitation spectroscopy of the B1s and C1s edges revealed that the boron atoms substitute carbon atoms in the tube lattice keeping an sp2-like bond with their nearest C neighbour atoms. Our results show that a simple rigid band model as has been applied previously to intercalated SWCNT is not sufficient to explain the changes in the electronic properties of highly doped B-SWCNT and a new type of a highly defective BC3 SWNT with new electronic properties is obtained. Finally, different silicon carbide nanostructures were produced. The spectroscopic and microscopic data led to a good understanding of the formation process. NH3 acts as a source of hydrogen that plays a key role in the formation of the structures through its ability to decompose SiC at high temperature such that along with the stacking faults that arise from the many polytypes of SiC the produced SiC nanorods become porous then hollow and eventually are completely decomposed