Building China: Informal Work and the New Precariat

[Excerpt] This book makes three main contributions to our understanding of informal work in China. First, it documents diversity in employment relations and the labor market. This diversity exists in spite of the fact that all of these workers are similar: they are all men who are unregistered migrants working informally in the construction industry in major cities in China. This book helps us make sense of that diversity and the diversity of informal precarious work more generally. Second, it expands our understanding of China’s emerging labor regime, which is central to labor control, intimately related to the urbanization process, and ultimately linked to China’s overall economic success. Finally, it shows how these migrants struggle against the disciplining process, contest exploitation, and protest in unique ways. Just as with other workers toiling under capitalism, important structural forces shape their work and lives but are not deterministic. Thus, this large, emerging segment of workers should not be overlooked when analyzing the complexities of class and class politics in China

Solvent-induced micelle formation in a hydrophobic interaction model

We investigate the aggregation of amphiphilic molecules by adapting the two-state Muller-Lee-Graziano model for water, in which a solvent-induced hydrophobic interaction is included implicitly. We study the formation of various types of micelle as a function of the distribution of hydrophobic regions at the molecular surface. Successive substitution of non-polar surfaces by polar ones demonstrates the influence of hydrophobicity on the upper and lower critical solution temperatures. Aggregates of lipid molecules, described by a refinement of the model in which a hydrophobic tail of variable length interacts with different numbers of water molecules, are stabilized as the length of the tail increases. We demonstrate that the essential features of micelle formation are primarily solvent-induced, and are explained within a model which focuses only on the alteration of water structure in the vicinity of the hydrophobic surface regions of amphiphiles in solution.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures; some rearrangement of introduction and discussion sections, streamlining of formalism and general compression; to appear in Phys. Rev.

On the pseudolinear crossing number

A drawing of a graph is {\em pseudolinear} if there is a pseudoline arrangement such that each pseudoline contains exactly one edge of the drawing. The {\em pseudolinear crossing number} of a graph $G$ is the minimum number of pairwise crossings of edges in a pseudolinear drawing of $G$. We establish several facts on the pseudolinear crossing number, including its computational complexity and its relationship to the usual crossing number and to the rectilinear crossing number. This investigation was motivated by open questions and issues raised by Marcus Schaefer in his comprehensive survey of the many variants of the crossing number of a graph.Comment: 12 page