http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/57738 Sun, 26 May 2013 00:20:53 GMT 2013-05-26T00:20:53Z http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu:80/bitstream/id/209924/icpsr_logo.gif http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/57738 http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/83273 Ecological Frontiers on the Grasslands of Kansas: Changes in Farm Scale and Crop Diversity Sylvester, Kenneth M. Farms stood at an ecological frontier in the 1930s. With new and better agricultural machinery, more farms than ever before made the leap to thousand acre enterprises. But did they abandon mixed husbandry in the process? This article explores the origins of the modem relationship between scale and diversity using a new sample of Kansas farms. In 25 townships across the state, between 1875 and 1940, the evidence demonstrates that relatively few plains farms were agents of early monoculture. Rather than a process driven by single-crop farming, settlement was shaped by farms that grew more diverse with each generation. Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/83273 2009-08-05T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/83272 An Unremembered Diversity: Mixed Husbandry and the American Grasslands Sylvester, Kenneth M. The Green Revolution of the 1960s brought about a dramatic rise in global crop yields. But, as most observers acknowledge, this has come at a considerable cost to biodiversity. Plant breeding, synthetic fertilizers, and mechanization steadily narrowed the number of crop varieties commercially available to farmers and promoted fencerow-to-fencerow monocultures. Many historians trace the origins of this style of industrialized agriculture to the last great plow-up of the Great Plains in the 1920s. In the literature, farms in the plains are often described metaphorically as wheat factories, degrading successive landscapes. While in many ways these farms were a departure from earlier forms of husbandry in the American experience, monocultures were quite rare during the early transformation of the plains. Analysis of a large representative sample, based on manuscript agricultural censuses and involving twenty-five townships across the state of Kansas, demonstrates that diverse production reached even the most challenging of plains landscapes Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/83272 2009-07-07T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/78307 The Enduring Value of Social Science Research: The Use and Reuse of Primary Research Data Pienta, Amy M.; Alter, George C.; Lyle, Jared A. The goal of this paper is to examine the extent to which social science research data are shared and assess whether data sharing affects research productivity tied to the research data themselves. We construct a database from administrative records containing information about thousands of social science studies that have been conducted over the last 40 years. Included in the database are descriptions of social science data collections funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. A survey of the principal investigators of a subset of these social science awards was also conducted. We report that very few social science data collections are preserved and disseminated by an archive or institutional repository. Informal sharing of data in the social sciences is much more common. The main analysis examines publication metrics that can be tied to the research data collected with NSF and NIH funding – total publications, primary publications (including PI), and secondary publications (non-research team). Multivariate models of count of publications suggest that data sharing, especially sharing data through an archive, leads to many more times the publications than not sharing data. This finding is robust even when the models are adjusted for PI characteristics, grant award features, and institutional characteristics. This paper was presented at “The Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research” workshop, Torino, Italy, in April, 2010. See: http://www.carloalberto.org/files/brick_dime_strike_workshopagenda_april2010.pdf. Mon, 22 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/78307 2010-11-22T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/61289 Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/61289 2005-01-01T00:00:00Z