Blood Over Soil: The Misconception of Nazi Environmentalism

Most people do not immediately think of environmentalism when they hear the term “Nazi.” Nazis were racist imperialists who killed millions of people. Is it possible for the genocidal policies of the Third Reich to be compatible with green politics and nature preservation? Several historians and sociologists during a period of anti-green backlash and Nazi revisionism in the late 20th century argued that environmentalism was, indeed, a central part of National Socialism. Citing environmentally progressive Nazi legislation combined with elements of the “Blood and Soil” element of Nazi ideology, these individuals made a case that Hitler and the Nazis were some of the first modern environmentalists. This intriguing and unusual claim was used both to depict Nazis more favorably as well as to paint contemporary green politicians in a more negative light. Although it is important to consider the views of such historians like Schama and Bramwell, who argued the above point, the Nazis cannot be called environmentalists. Despite their passing of a few noteworthy pieces of green legislation and their admiration for the German landscape, the Nazis prioritized rearmament, war, and ethnic purity far above national environmental protection policies, which were largely abandoned with the escalation of the Second World War. Nature preservation remained an effective propaganda theme for the National Socialists, as they were quite fond of linking the volk and their pure blood to the German land, but sweeping environmental reform simply did not take place. With that said, it is imperative to review the scholarship of those who argue that the Nazis were true environmentalists and the elements of the Third Reich that led them to come to those faulty conclusions

Orientation and experience in the perception of form: A study with the arizona whale-kangaroo

When subjects are presented with the Arizona whale-kangaroo, an ambiguous figure, perception of the whale is more common than perception of the kangaroo. However, this difference is smaller in Australian than American subjects. Perception of the kangaroo is more orientation dependent than perception of the whale, which is perceived at all orientations of the stimulus. Together with the difference between subject populations, this effect reveals an influence of past experience on the perception of this new ambiguous figure. Perception of the whale versus the kangaroo differs in both reconstrual of parts and realignment of the object-centered reference frame. Observers report reference frame reconstruals before reference frame reversals, shedding light on the organization of object memory

Fourier Transform Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy: the possibility to obtain constant energy maps and the band dispersion using a local measurement

We present here an overview of the Fourier Transform Scanning Tunneling spectroscopy technique (FT-STS). This technique allows one to probe the electronic properties of a two-dimensional system by analyzing the standing waves formed in the vicinity of defects. We review both the experimental and theoretical aspects of this approach, basing our analysis on some of our previous results, as well as on other results described in the literature. We explain how the topology of the constant energy maps can be deduced from the FT of dI/dV map images which exhibit standing waves patterns. We show that not only the position of the features observed in the FT maps, but also their shape can be explained using different theoretical models of different levels of approximation. Thus, starting with the classical and well known expression of the Lindhard susceptibility which describes the screening of electron in a free electron gas, we show that from the momentum dependence of the susceptibility we can deduce the topology of the constant energy maps in a joint density of states approximation (JDOS). We describe how some of the specific features predicted by the JDOS are (or are not) observed experimentally in the FT maps. The role of the phase factors which are neglected in the rough JDOS approximation is described using the stationary phase conditions. We present also the technique of the T-matrix approximation, which takes into account accurately these phase factors. This technique has been successfully applied to normal metals, as well as to systems with more complicated constant energy contours. We present results recently obtained on graphene systems which demonstrate the power of this technique, and the usefulness of local measurements for determining the band structure, the map of the Fermi energy and the constant-energy maps.Comment: 33 pages, 15 figures; invited review article, to appear in Journal of Physics D: Applied Physic

A field investigation of flight anxiety: evidence of gender differences in consumer behaviors among Las Vegas passengers

Purpose: This study examines how anxious the Las Vegas public is through a case study of one local international airport. Design/methodology: This study examines gender differences in consumer behaviors among the flying public inside Las Vegas McCarran International Airport in a field experiment theoretically grounded in Terror Management Theory. Findings and Originality/value: Because airports are replete with reminders of human mortality, it is not a surprise that death awareness and flight anxiety may be closely related. The flying public that is anxious to fly presents an interesting public relations situation for airports. Therefore, this study examines how anxious the Las Vegas public is through a case study of one local international airport. Results show that flight anxiety does provoke the same kind of existential defenses that traditional death awareness does. This study also suggests that men and women do not react to flight anxiety in a uniform way, they are different in their reactions in seeking to gamble, eating unhealthy food, and an increased desire for electronic entertainment.Peer Reviewe

Establishing a Baseline Plant Species Inventory Within the Penn’s Woods Deer Exclosure

Overpopulation of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) is a problem adversely affecting the ecological health of eastern deciduous forests in the United States, including those in southeastern Pennsylvania. Trampling and herbivory have led to the loss of native understory and ground cover species and expedited the invasion of aggressive exotic plants. The use of deer exclosure fencing has become common practice as a method of protecting vulnerable sites from these impacts. In 2016, an exclosure was installed in the Penn’s Woods section of Morris Arboretum’s natural lands with the hopes of facilitating forest restoration and learning about the response of the plant community. This project was designed as a comprehensive survey to establish a baseline record of plant species present within the exclosure so that changes in species composition can be monitored over time. In order to organize this inventory, a grid system of 22 plots was created and mapped using a GPS device and ArcGIS software. The herbaceous and woody plant layers within each plot were surveyed and documented. Statistical analysis was used to identify the most ecologically significant plants. In addition, photographs were taken of each plot and of the tree canopy in both winter and spring, so that these can be repeated over time to visualize changes to the canopy and understory layers. This data will be available to the manager of the Morris Arboretum natural lands and may be referenced for planning and restoration efforts going forward. Strategic corners of the grid were permanently marked so that it may be easily rebuilt and this inventory can be replicated at regular intervals in the future. Information gleaned from these surveys will afford a better understanding for how the exclusion of white-tailed deer impacts the forest ecology, and can inform future uses of deer exclosures on the property for habitat improvement

Interrelations Between Religiosity, Mental Health, and Children

This dissertation consists of three independent but related research articles dealing with religiosity, mental health, and children. The first uses the General Social Survey to perform the first large-N, non-convenience-sample analysis of the relationship between belief in God and sense of purpose. Using logistic regression analysis I find that there is a positive association, expanding our knowledge of the association between religious frameworks on a particular facet of mental health. The second article uses OLS to test the relationship between belief in God and fertility intentions in the Czech Republic and Slovenia using the European Fertility and Family Survey, once again finding positive relationships between belief in God or belief in a higher power and fertility intentions. This finding is theoretically important because the prior literature has tended to invoke directly institutional mechanisms in the fertility/religion relationship without considering the possibility that more individuated forms of religiosity may have independent associations. Finally, the third article uses the General Social Survey (and, once again, OLS) to test the role of religiosity as a moderator in the relationship between number of children and happiness. The literature on children and happiness has progressed beyond simple associations, but the literature incorporating concrete social moderators is still in its infancy, and especially social moderators whose influences are vectored through ideational, and not necessarily material, associations. I make the theoretical argument that, as religiosity in the United States tends to be associated with pronatalist norms and culture, and as happiness is positively associated with fulfilling sociocultural imperatives, then, all things being equal, the more religious will have a higher happiness effect (or lower unhappiness effect) from their children than the less religious. Using General Social Survey data, my empirical analyses empirically confirm this hypothesis, showing a positive and significant interaction term between religion and child number, representing a higher happiness association with child number for the religious. This interaction is partially explained by another interaction term between higher ideal family size (measuring pronatalist tendencies), but this second interaction does not explain all of the religiosity/children interactive effect

HOLLYWOODLANDIA: CELEBRITY WOMEN, MOVIE CULTURE, AND AMERICAN PUBLIC WOMANHOOD, 1916-1950

This project proposes to study the ways in which celebrity women’s behavior may have encouraged American women to challenge, but not necessarily subvert, traditional gender roles even as Hollywood publicity continued to emphasize the importance of those same roles in women’s lives. It does that by examining three sites where celebrity women prominently lived, worked, played, and volunteered between 1920 and 1950: the Hollywood Studio Club, a boarding house only for women in the entertainment industry, in Los Angeles; the Sun Valley Ski Resort, the first modern ski resort in the American West, in central Idaho; and the Hollywood Canteen, a volunteer canteen for servicemen staffed only by Hollywood personnel, also in Los Angeles. An examination of the archival records of each site, together with fan magazine coverage, reveals that these sites became spaces where celebrity women pushed the boundaries of traditional gender norms and the strict separation of spheres that movie fan culture promoted. Simultaneously, these places came to represent certain ideologies about gender, class, and race in the United States between 1920 and 1950. Hollywoodlandia demonstrates at these three individual sites, celebrity women behaved in ways that may have encouraged women to challenge traditional gender roles and expectations about their bodies in public spaces. However, the publicity about that same behavior at these sites reveals the extents to which creators of movie fan culture were invested in maintaining and reflecting not only traditional gender roles, but also propagating images of rich white women meant to function as representatives of the evolving conceptions of an “ideal” national American womanhood between 1920 and 1950, a womanhood that was malleable and modern and yet unchangingly restrictive. Within this argument can be found messages about the differences between how celebrity women and the film industry reflected, disseminated, and pushed back against prevailing ideas about gender, race, class, and nationalism in the United States during the industry’s golden age, laying the groundwork for a postwar cultural turn toward the home as women’s appropriate domain