The Neotoma Paleoecology Database is a community-curated data resource that supports interdisciplinary global change research by enabling broad-scale studies of taxon and community diversity, distributions, and dynamics during the large environmental changes of the past. By consolidating many kinds of data into a common repository, Neotoma lowers costs of paleodata management, makes paleoecological data openly available, and offers a high-quality, curated resource. Neotoma’s distributed scientific governance model is flexible and scalable, with many open pathways for participation by new members, data contributors, stewards, and research communities. The Neotoma data model supports, or can be extended to support, any kind of paleoecological or paleoenvironmental data from sedimentary archives. Data additions to Neotoma are growing and now include >3.8 million observations, >17,000 datasets, and >9200 sites. Dataset types currently include fossil pollen, vertebrates, diatoms, ostracodes, macroinvertebrates, plant macrofossils, insects, testate amoebae, geochronological data, and the recently added organic biomarkers, stable isotopes, and specimen-level data. Multiple avenues exist to obtain Neotoma data, including the Explorer map-based interface, an application programming interface, the neotoma R package, and digital object identifiers. As the volume and variety of scientific data grow, community-curated data resources such as Neotoma have become foundational infrastructure for big data science.

Almost two years after the inception of the so-called “Arab Spring” some of its primary constituencies remain enigmatic. To a certain degree, this is an effect of previous scholarly interest in various regimes’ strategies for maintaining their monopolization of critical resources, and, ultimately, of state power. The literature on “durable authoritarianism” has taught us much about autocratic longevity and the structures and dynamics that underpinned the management of the populace, as well as marginalization of challengers in a variety of regimes throughout the region. As some scholars have recently observed, however, the focus on authoritarian regimes’ staying power led to overestimations of their strength and, correspondingly, to underestimations of their publics. Of course studies of social movements, resistant populations, and opposition groups are plentiful and trends like the growth of Islamist groups have received copious attention.

The purpose of this study was to provide an empirical measure of bedroom personalization and a descriptive characterization of the types of items included in a personalized space. The study compared the extent of personalization in three types of bedrooms, varying as to their homelike quality (private-homelike, private-institutional, and ward-institutional). A measure of the relative degree of personalization was obtained by recording the number of personal items for each room and dividing the number of items per room by each room's available vertical and horizontal surface area. The degree of personalization was