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1. Tracking a half century of media reporting on gray wolves

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13225  

   Killion, Alexander K. ; Melvin, Tracy ; Lindquist, Eric ; Carter, Neil H. ( November 2018 , Conservation Biology)

   Natural resource and wildlife managers must balance the disparate priorities of a diversity of stakeholders. To manage these priorities, a firm understanding of topics salient to the public is needed. The media often report on issues of importance to the public; therefore, these reports may be a useful measure of public interest. However, efficient methods for distinguishing diverse topics related to a wildlife management issue reported in the media and changes in the salience of those topics have been lacking. We used latent Dirichlet allocation, a Bayesian mixture model, to quantitatively assess the salience of topics surrounding the gray wolf (Canis lupus), which was reintroduced to Idaho (U.S.A.) in 1995. We analyzed articles published from 1960 to 2015 in an Idaho newspaper. We identified 6 distinct topics associated with gray wolves: policy, hunting, biological status, implementation of management, recovery, and human‐wolf conflict. The salience of topics pre‐ and postreintroduction of wolves (1995) and pre‐ and postdelisting of wolves from the U.S. Endangered Species Act (2009) differed significantly, underscoring that these events were turning points in how issues were being publicly discussed and framed. Articles written by the local reporters were more likely to report on topics regarding conflict between humans and wolves, whereas articles sourced from a national outlet reported more on topics pertaining to wolf policy and biological status. In the context of managing a contentious, far‐ranging, and long‐lived wildlife species, our methods can help guide the location and timing of a suite of management strategies (e.g., media relation plans and stakeholder engagement) that promote human‐wildlife coexistence across different landscapes.

    

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2. Systematic shifts in scaling behavior based on organizational strategy in universities

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254582  

   Taylor, Ryan C. ; Liang, Xiaofan ; Laubichler, Manfred D. ; West, Geoffrey B. ; Kempes, Christopher P. ; Dumas, Marion ( October 2021 , PLOS ONE)

   Amaral, Luís A. (Ed.)

   To build better theories of cities, companies, and other social institutions such as universities, requires that we understand the tradeoffs and complementarities that exist between their core functions, and that we understand bounds to their growth. Scaling theory has been a powerful tool for addressing such questions in diverse physical, biological and urban systems, revealing systematic quantitative regularities between size and function. Here we apply scaling theory to the social sciences, taking a synoptic view of an entire class of institutions. The United States higher education system serves as an ideal case study, since it includes over 5,800 institutions with shared broad objectives, but ranges in strategy from vocational training to the production of novel research, contains public, nonprofit and for-profit models, and spans sizes from 10 to roughly 100,000 enrolled students. We show that, like organisms, ecosystems and cities, universities and colleges scale in a surprisingly systematic fashion following simple power-law behavior. Comparing seven commonly accepted sectors of higher education organizations, we find distinct regimes of scaling between a school’s total enrollment and its expenditures, revenues, graduation rates and economic added value. Our results quantify how each sector leverages specific economies of scale to address distinct priorities. Taken together, the scaling of features within a sector along with the shifts in scaling across sectors implies that there are generic mechanisms and constraints shared by all sectors, which lead to tradeoffs between their different societal functions and roles. We highlight the strong complementarity between public and private research universities, and community and state colleges, that all display superlinear returns to scale. In contrast to the scaling of biological systems, our results highlight that much of the observed scaling behavior is modulated by the particular strategies of organizations rather than an immutable set of constraints. 

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3. Rural Resiliency Hubs: An Integrated, Community-Centered Approach to Addressing the Resiliency Divide through Rural Public Libraries

   Mardis, Marcia A. ; Jones, Faye R. ; Ozguven, Eren E. ; Horner, Mark ; Piekalkiewicz, Ellen ; Pickett, Scott ; Mathias, John ; De Leon, Jessica ( January 2021 , New Librarianship Symposia)

   Lankes, R.David (Ed.)

   Resilience is often treated as a single-dimension system attribute, or various dimensions of resilience are studied separately without considering multi-dimensionality. The increasing frequency of catastrophic natural or man-made disasters affecting rural areas demands holistic assessments of community vulnerability and assessment. Disproportionate effects of disasters on minorities, low-income, hard-to-reach, and vulnerable populations demand a community-oriented planning approach to address the “resilience divide.” Rural areas have many advantages, but low population density, coupled with dispersed infrastructures and community support networks, make these areas more affected by natural disasters. This paper will catalyze three key learnings from our current work in public librarians’ roles in disaster resiliency: 1) rural communities are composed of diverse sub-communities, each which experiences and responds to traumatic events differently, depending on micro-geographic and demographic drivers; 2) public libraries are central to rural life, providing a range of informational, educational, social, and personal services, especially in remote areas that lack reliable access to community resources during disasters; and 3) rural citizens tend to be very self-reliant and are committed to strengthening and sustaining community resiliency with local human capital and resources. Public libraries and their librarian leaders are often a “crown jewel” of rural areas’ community infrastructure and this paper will present a community-based design and assessment process for resiliency hubs located in and operated through rural public libraries. The core technical and social science research questions explored in the proposed paper are: 1) Who were the key beneficiaries and what did they need? 2) What was the process of designing a resiliency hub? 3) What did library resiliency hubs provide and how can they be sustained? This resiliency hub study will detail co-production of solutions and involves an inclusive collaboration among researchers, librarians, and community members to address the effects of cascading impacts of natural disasters. The novel co-design process detailed in the paper reflects 1) an in-depth understanding of the complex interactions among libraries, residents, governments, and other agencies by collecting sociotechnical hurricane-related data for Calhoun County, Florida, USA, a region devastated by Hurricane Michael (2018) and hard-hit by Covid-19; 2) analyzed data from newly-developed fusing algorithms and incorporating multiple communities; and 3) co-designed resiliency hubs sited in public libraries. This research leverages a unique opportunity for the co-development of integrated library-centered policies and technologies to establish a new paradigm for developing disaster resiliency in rural settings. Public libraries serve a diverse population who will directly benefit from practical support tailored to their needs. The project will inform efficient plans to ensure that high-need groups are not isolated in disasters. The knowledge and insight gained from disseminating the study’s results will not only improve our understanding of emergency response operations, but also will contribute to the development of new disaster-related policies and plans for public libraries, with a broader application to rural communities in many settings. 

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4. Rural Resiliency Hubs: An Integrated, Community-Centered Approach to Addressing the Resiliency Divide through Rural Public Libraries

   Mardis, M.A. ( January 2022 , New Librarianship Symposium)

   Lankes, R. David (Ed.)

   Resilience is often treated as a single-dimension system attribute, or various dimensions of resilience are studied separately without considering multi-dimensionality. The increasing frequency of catastrophic natural or man-made disasters affecting rural areas demands holistic assessments of community vulnerability and assessment. Disproportionate effects of disasters on minorities, low-income, hard-to-reach, and vulnerable populations demand a community-oriented planning approach to address the “resilience divide.” Rural areas have many advantages, but low population density, coupled with dispersed infrastructures and community support networks, make these areas more affected by natural disasters. This paper will catalyze three key learnings from our current work in public librarians’ roles in disaster resiliency: rural communities are composed of diverse sub-communities, each which experiences and responds to traumatic events differently, depending on micro-geographic and demographic drivers. Rural citizens tend to be very self-reliant and are committed to strengthening and sustaining community resiliency with local human capital and resources. Public libraries are central to rural life, providing a range of informational, educational, social, and personal services, especially in remote areas that lack reliable access to community resources during disasters. Public libraries and their librarian leaders are often a “crown jewel” of rural areas’ community infrastructure and this paper will present a community-based design and assessment process for resiliency hubs located in and operated through rural public libraries. The core technical and social science research questions explored in the proposed paper are: 1) Who were the key beneficiaries and what did they need? 2) What was the process of designing a resiliency hub? 3) What did library resiliency hubs provide and how can they be sustained? This resiliency hub study will detail co-production of solutions and involves an inclusive collaboration among researchers, librarians, and community members to address the effects of cascading impacts of natural disasters. The novel co-design process detailed in the paper reflects an in-depth understanding of the complex interactions among libraries, residents, governments, and other agencies by collecting sociotechnical hurricane-related data for Calhoun County, Florida, USA, a region devastated by Hurricane Michael (2018) and hard-hit by Covid-19. We analyzed data from newly developed fusing algorithms and incorporating multiple communities and developed a framework and process to co-design resiliency hubs sited in public libraries. This research leverages a unique opportunity to library-centered policies and technologies to establish a new paradigm for developing disaster resiliency in rural settings. Public libraries serve a diverse population who will directly benefit from practical support tailored to their needs. The project will inform efficient plans to ensure that high-need groups are not isolated in disasters. The knowledge and insight gained from the resiliency hub design process will not only improve our understanding of emergency response operations, but also will contribute to the development of new disaster related policies and plans for public libraries, with a broader application to rural communities in many settings. 

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5. Constructing a comprehensive and adaptive survey for cultural analysis of engineering departments

   Berger, E. ; Briody, E. ; DeBoer, J. ; Rhoads, J. ; Francis, J. ; Witek, L. ; Rothstein, R. ; Lee, Y. ( December 2021 , Proceedings of REES AAEE 2021)

   ABSTRACT CONTEXT Culture influences the dynamics and outcomes of organizations in profound ways, including individual-level outcomes (like the quality of work products) and collective impacts (such as reputation or influence). As such, understanding organizational culture is a crucial element of understanding performance; from an anthropological perspective, ‘performance’ is not an outcome of culture, it is a part of culture. A key challenge in understanding organizational culture, especially in complex academic organizations, is the lack of a flexible, scalable approach for data collection and analysis. PURPOSE OR GOAL In this study, we report on our development of a survey-based cultural characterization tool that leverages both lightweight data collection from stakeholders in the organization and public information about that organization. We also integrate perspectives from prior literature about faculty, students, and staff in academic departments. Taken together, the resulting survey covers key elements of culture and allows for scalable data collection across settings via customizations and embedded logic in the survey itself. The outcome of this work is a design process for a new and promising tool for scalable cultural characterization, and we have deployed this tool across two institutions. APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS We leverage prior research, our own preliminary data collection, and our experience with this approach in a different setting to develop a cultural characterization survey suitable for delivery to multiple engineering department stakeholders (faculty, staff, and students). We start with a modest number of interviews, stratified by these three groups and achieving saturation of responses, to understand their views on their organization, its strengths and weaknesses, and their perceptions of how it ‘works’. We merge this information with public data (for instance, departmental vision or mission statements, which convey a sense of priorities or values) as well as prior literature about higher education culture. We also draw upon our experience in another setting as well as pilot testing data, and the result is a carefully-constructed set of dichotomous items that are offered to department stakeholders in survey form using an electronic survey platform. We also collect background and demographic information in the survey. The resulting data are analyzed using Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT) to extract meaningful information about the departmental culture from the perspectives of the stakeholder groups. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES The resulting survey consists of two parts, each with sub-components. The two top level survey parts contain: (i) items common to all respondents in all settings (i.e. all institutions in this study), and (ii) a set of institution-specific items. Within those sections, the framing of the items is calibrated for the stakeholder groups so that items make sense to them within the context of their experience. The survey has been administered, and the data are being analyzed and interpreted presently. We expect the results to capture the specific elements of local culture within these institutions, as well as differences in perspectives and experience among the three primary stakeholder groups. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY This study demonstrates a scalable approach to survey development for the purposes of cultural characterization, and its use across settings and with multiple stakeholder groups. This work enables a very nuanced view of culture within a department, and these results can be used within academic departments to enable discussion about change, priorities, performance, and the work environment. 

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