American Square Dance Vol. 45, No. 7 (July 1990)

Monthly square dance magazine that began publication in 1945

The Papers of Thomas A. Edison

This richly illustrated volume explores Edison’s inventive and personal pursuits from 1885 to 1887.Two decades after the American Civil War, no name was more closely associated with the nation’s inventive and entrepreneurial spirit than that of Thomas Edison. The restless changes of those years were reflected in the life of America’s foremost inventor. Having cemented his reputation with his electric lighting system, Edison had decided to withdraw partially from that field. At the start of 1885, newly widowed at mid-life with three young children, he launched into a series of personal and professional migrations, setting in motion chains of events that would influence his work and fundamentally reshape his life. Edison’s inventive activities took off in new directions, flowing between practical projects (such as wireless and high-capacity telegraph systems) and futuristic ones (exploring forms of electromagnetic energy and the convertibility of one to another). Inside of two years, he would travel widely, marry the daughter of a prominent industrialist and religious educator, leave New York City for a grand home in a sylvan suburb, and construct a winter laboratory and second home in Florida. Edison’s family and interior life are remarkably visible at this moment; his papers include the only known diary in which he recorded personal thoughts and events. By 1887, the familiar rhythms of his life began to reassert themselves in his new settings; the family faded from view as he planned, built, and occupied a New Jersey laboratory complex befitting his status. The eighth volume of the series, New Beginnings includes 358 documents (chosen from among thousands) that are the most revealing and representative of Edison’s work, life, and place in American culture in these years. Illustrated with hundreds of Edison’s drawings, these documents are further illuminated by meticulous research on a wide range of sources, including the most recently digitized newspapers and journals of the day

2016, UMaine News Press Releases

This is a catalog of press releases put out by the University of Maine Division of Marketing and Communications between January 4, 2016 and December 30, 2016

Radioactivists: community, controversy and the rise of nuclear physics

This dissertation is a social and technical history of radioactivity research in the 1920s, and of the emergence of nuclear physics in the 1930s. It is concerned with the production, circulation and certification of practice and knowledge in these fields of scientific research. By 1914, the study of radioactivity was confined to a few centres - Paris, Berlin, Manchester and Vienna - possessing relatively large quantities of radium. The politics and organisation of this relatively closed network were irrevocably altered by the First World War. The election of Ernest Rutherford to the Cavendish Chair of Experimental Physics at Cambridge in 1919 brought radioactivity research, and a programme of Imperial physics, to the Cavendish Laboratory. Rutherford’s programme of research, based on his speculative nuclear model of the atom (1911), sought to map the internal topography of the atomic nucleus by means of scintillation counting experiments. Rutherford’s work on artificial disintegration, combined with F.W. Aston’s elucidation of the isotopes of the light elements by means of the mass-spectrograph, brought about a profound change in physicists’ and chemists’ views of atomic architecture. In the early 1920s, as laboratories in Europe recovered from the war, the work of the Cavendish Laboratory was unchallenged. During the 1920s, as other laboratories entered the field of nuclear research, however, a series of controversies brought into question the reliability of the scintillation technique and the integrity of all experimental results based upon it. The foundational data yielded by the mass-spectrograph, too, were contested, occasioning a ‘crisis of certitude’ in radioactivity research, and prompting a redistribution of trust into alternative sources of experimental evidence - electronic (Geiger) counters and cloud chambers. The crediting of these techniques (which proved to be as problematic as those they ostensibly replaced) opened up new kinds of problems to experimental investigation. In virtue of the new kinds of skills now required in the laboratory, a re-definition of the investigative community accompanied technical innovation. In the wake of a prolonged controversy between Cambridge and Vienna, a conference was convened at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1928, as a direct result of which researchers in several other European laboratories (including Maurice de Broglie and the Joliot-Curies in Paris, Bothe in Berlin and Pose at Halle) entered the field of nuclear research, multiplying the number of sites at which the new techniques were deployed. Theoretical physicists like George Gamow, too, began to apply the novel methods of wave mechanics to nuclear problems, gradually transforming the bounds of the possible and the plausible in nuclear research. A reconfigured network of embodied practice gradually crystallised around the development of these material and conceptual technologies. This network - including laboratories and researchers in Cambridge, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna, New York, Berkeley and Washington D.C. - embodied the emergent discipline of ‘nuclear physics.’ Chadwick’s disclosure of the ‘neutron’ in 1932 using the new experimental techniques ratified this social and technical re-alignment. The emergence of Nuclear Physics as a recognised discipline by 1934 was thus the simultaneous certification of a new regime of practice, a new sociopolitical network of laboratories and a new ontology

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

University of San Diego News Print Media Coverage 2008.04

Printed clippings housed in folders with a table of contents arranged by topic.https://digital.sandiego.edu/print-media/1063/thumbnail.jp