131,330 research outputs found
McCook\u27s Man on Main Street: Publisher Harry D. Strunk and the politics of water reclamation in southwest Nebraska, 1928-1938
No full textBy the time Harry D. Strunk arrived in his new home of McCook, Nebraska in 1909, he had set his sights on becoming a newspaperman. While only seventeen years-old at the time of his first job with a McCook newspaper, he had already worked as a printer\u27s devil and itinerant printer since the age of fourteen. With his arrival in McCook and first job in that city with the established Tribune, he soon found that his future in the newspaper business lay with starting his own paper. In 1911, without benefit of a formal journalistic education, Strunk opened the Red Willow County Gazette. With his own newspaper, he immediately challenged the community\u27s recognized editorial voice at the Tribune. In 1924, he established a daily newspaper. For the next forty-seven years until its publisher\u27s death in 1961, the McCook Daily Gazette served as the newspaper and editorial voice for Southwest Nebraska and Northwest Kansas. In 1926, when he built a new office building for the Gazette on McCook\u27s Main Street, Strunk had etched in the concrete above the building\u27s entryway his concept of service to the community. With the motto, Service is the Rent We Pay for the Space We Occupy in This World, Strunk set the tone and direction for both himself and his newspaper. Strunk\u27s dedication to community service was no more evident than in his lifetime work on behalf of flood control and irrigation along the Republican River. For a span of some three decades, McCook\u27s man on Main Street hurled editorial challenges at state and national politicians to fund water control projects in Southwest Nebraska. Within his editorial demands for government programs to benefit his community, Strunk maintained a healthy dose of political pragmatism. In 1928, Strunk began an active role in the foundation and work of the Twin Valley Association of Commercial Clubs. That organization stood in the forefront for planning irrigation and flood control programs along the Republican and Frenchman rivers. As a member of the group\u27s executive committee and chairman o f its flood control committee, Strunk played an important role in making the goals of the organization known to elected officials. Among the politicians who felt the wrath of Strunk\u27s editorial attacks on sometimes inattentive politicians was a fellow townsman, the popular five-term senator from Nebraska, George W. Norris. In a volatile exchange of correspondence in advance of the 1930 senatorial election, the two men engaged in political polemics over their differing visions of water control in semi-arid Southwest Nebraska. With similar visions about water control but different methods for achievement, the two men sparred over how best to bring both flood control and irrigation to a land of sparse water resources. It was over the issue of water control that they had their greatest disagreement. Norris favored combining hydro-electric power with irrigation and flood control, while Strunk believed that water power had no place along the Republican River. Their differences would largely disappear when they found common bond after a devastating flood hit along the Republican River in 1935. Strunk became well known throughout the state and much o f the Midwest because of his dedication to water control and reclamation on the upper Republican River. His importance in bringing federally funded water programs to southwestern Nebraska was recognized by Congress. Congress passed legislation in 1952 designating the body of water held by Medicine Creek Dam near Cambridge, Nebraska, as Harry Strunk Lake. From an itinerant printer to newspaper publisher to a recognized water reclamationist, Harry Strunk fulfilled his motto of service to his community o f McCook and Southwest Nebraska
3-Dimensional Electron Microscopy of Biological Specimens
No full textThree-dimensional (3D) imaging is an important tool in electron microscopy, especially in biological specimens where the main focus is the structure of the cells. Many times important information is lost because the exact orientation of a specimen is unknown. We tested two different 3D imaging techniques, focused ion beam (FIB) slice and view, and cryo-FIB thinning of samples for use in cryo transmission electron tomography (cryo-TEM) and cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET).
We began our research with room temperature FIB slice and view, with an intention to move onto slice and view at cryogenic temperatures. We found this technique to be difficult to control and the time required to produce results was simply too high. We moved on to investigating cryo-FIB milling as a tool for thinning cryo-ET specimens. Advances in cryo-ET have enabled high-resolution 3D imaging of complex assemblies and determination of cellular architectures in their close-to-native states. However, one major limitation, the accessible specimen thickness, has hindered its broader application in cellular biology. Recent efforts have been made to create thin, frozen-hydrated sections using cryo-ultramicrotomy, but with many mechanical artifacts and low yields. Here, we report a method that applies a focused ion beam (FIB) at cryogenic temperature (cryo-FIB) to reduce the thickness of frozen-hydrated cells, including mammalian cells, to a degree suitable for cryo-ET
MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations
No full textInformation overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
"Closing the R&D Gap, Evaluating the Sources of R&D Spending"
No full textBoth spending and tax policies have been implemented in the United States with the goal of stimulating private sector research and development (R&D). Karier questions whether current R&D policy, especially the research and experimentation tax credit, can contribute to closing the gap between nondefense expenditures on R&D in the United States and such expenditures in other countries, such as Japan and Germany. He also explores possible changes to our current R&D policy to make it more effective.
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Scholarly Communication and Publishing Lunch and Learn Talk #11: The ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund
No full textAt the May 2014 talk, you will learn about the ULS Open Access Author Fee Fund--what it is, why we do it, how it works, and how the program is going so far
Obstetric litigation is asphyxiating our maternity services
No full textCopyright © 2006 The American College of Obstetricians and GynecologistsObstetric care in the United States, as judged by maternal mortality, neonatal mortality, stillbirth rates, or any other metric, has never been better. Despite this, litigation over "bad outcomes" is threatening the specialty, not only now, but into the future. Despite damage to our specialty, the injured party often benefits little, if at all, from the process. Potential solutions include an emphasis on evidence-based medicine, a qualification and review process for medical experts, and a more rational and fair health court system.Hankins, Gary D. V.; MacLennan, Alastair H.; Speer, Michael E.; Strunk, Albert JD; Nelson, Kari
The R&D Tax Incentives
No full textThis article sets out some background information and reflections of the author on the R&D tax incentive schemes included in the Common Corporate Tax Base (CCTB) Proposal. In particular the author analyzes the stimulus to private R&D through ad hoc tax incentives included in the CCTB Proposal and dives into the actual provisions included in the Proposal highlighting the most relevant issues connected with their design and interpretation. Moreover, the author explores the interaction between the CCTB Proposal and the granting by Member States of domestic R&D tax incentives
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