Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Legitimate Weapon Systems or Unlawful Angels of Death?

Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the United States has utilized Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to locate, surveil and kill members of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and its associated forces. Such killings have decimated the leadership of these groups and disrupted their operations. However, there are collateral effects from UAV killings including civilian deaths. These deaths increase resentment and hatred toward the US, which is channeled by terrorist groups to recruit new members and for local support. Moreover, targeted killings outside a combat zone have political and diplomatic consequences. This paper argues that the current uses of UAV are legal under international and domestic law. However, it proposes amended targeting criteria, greater transparency and increased checks on the executive branch for future use of UAVs

The Spectrum of B Cell Neoplasia

Recent progress in our understanding of the immune system and the development of new techniques that permit the precise identification of lymphocytes have permitted a reexamination of lymphoid neoplasms. Most of the non-Hodgkin\u27s lymphomas and lymphocytic leukemias have been characterized as T or B cell neoplasms and have been shown to possess features similar to those expressed by normal lymphoid cells at different stages of maturation. The clinical significance and therapeutic implications of these discoveries are now being explored. This paper presents a concise overview of the differentiation of human B lymphocytes, the surface and cytoplasmic markers that permit their recognition, and the diverse tumors that are now known to be malignant counterparts of normal B cell elements. Particular emphasis is placed on the utility of surface and cytoplasmic immunoglobulin as unique B cell markers and on the clonal nature of B cell tumors

American Drama and Ritual: Nebraska Football

Football is a major sport in the United States because of its dramatic enactment of social values of violence, bureaucracy, sexism, and commercialism. The spectators of this game are particularly enthralled in the state of Nebraska. Here, a state with a large geographical area and a small, predominanty rural population, the ~\u27 fans have elevated Nebraska football to a significant ritual and source for identification. As avid supporters they dress in the team colors, red and white; participate in pre- and postgame celebrations; travel great distances; and emotionally express their loyalty and dedication to Big Red. By combining the dramaturgical perspective of Erving Goffman with Victor Turner\u27s concepts of liminality and communitas, we have a theoretical framework for analyzing and evaluating cultural dramas in modern society. Nebraska football as a dramatic ritual, then, reveals its creative and destructive roots in American society

American Drama and Ritual: Nebraska Football

Football is a major sport in the United States because of its dramatic enactment of social values of violence, bureaucracy, sexism, and commercialism. The spectators of this game are particularly enthralled in the state of Nebraska. Here, a state with a large geographical area and a small, predominanty rural population, the ~\u27 fans have elevated Nebraska football to a significant ritual and source for identification. As avid supporters they dress in the team colors, red and white; participate in pre- and postgame celebrations; travel great distances; and emotionally express their loyalty and dedication to Big Red. By combining the dramaturgical perspective of Erving Goffman with Victor Turner\u27s concepts of liminality and communitas, we have a theoretical framework for analyzing and evaluating cultural dramas in modern society. Nebraska football as a dramatic ritual, then, reveals its creative and destructive roots in American society

The Americanization of Ritual Culture: The ‘Core Codes’ in American Culture and the Seductive Character of American ‘Fun.’

Modern life in the USA is driven by four “core codes” of oppression and repression which structure a wide range of cultural patterns, from fleeting, face-to-face interactions to enduring, large scale social institutions. The four codes (sex, class, bureaucratization, and the commodification of time) also give recognizable contours to modern American cultural rituals (participatory as well as media-constructed) and contribute to the seductive character of “fun” which these rituals typically generate. American “fun” provides short-lived, incomplete escapes from mundane routine, and simultaneously strengthens and reproduces the core oppression and repressions of everyday life. American “fun” provides its consumers with ritual experiences which are simultaneously attractive and alienating. This double-edge feature characterizes most media-constructed and participatory rituals in the USA. Fun-producing rituals result when the “core codes” of American life are imported into ritual events that could otherwise generate “play,” community renewal, and culturally significant releases from the oppressive and repressive dimensions of everyday life. The Americanization of culture is everywhere accelerated when ritual culture from the USA is marketed globally. At stake here is not the simple merchandizing of “fun”, but simultaneously the mass export of the “core codes” which make “fun” ever more attractive. A paradigm example of this process is the recent opening of EuroDisney and its powerful combination of participatory and media-constructed rituals. In the guise of good-natured “fun” and harmless “good times,” the marketing of American ritual culture such as Star Trek and EuroDisney insidiously reinforces the predatory American “core codes” that make “fun” seductive to consumers and profitable to investors

Lucile Eaves (1869-1953)

Lucile Eaves was a research and applied sociologist, a professor, and an activist. She was fired by a desire to change women\u27s status and that of laborers, anticipating the contemporary concern with the structural ties between class and sex. She worked in the South Park Social Settlement of San Francisco, and as a faculty member at Stanford University, the University of Nebraska, and Simmons College. Her work for the Women\u27s Educational and Industrial Union generated numerous quantitative studies of women\u27s lives in a variety of contexts. She is one of the first sociologists to study medical sociology, especially women with physical disabilities

Doctoral Dissertations as Liminal Journeys of the Self: Betwixt and Between in Graduate Sociology Programs

The sociology dissertation process is a liminal journey, a passage characterized by ambiguity, uncertainty, and crisis in which the student self is abandoned and a new professional self claims a world of power. authority, maturity, and responsibility. The theoretical perspectives of Victor Turner, Arnold Van Gennep, and George H. Mead are extended to conceptualize the “liminal self who undertakes this difficult and problematic journey of transformation. Experiential methodology, in which theory and autobiography are combined, is employed to explicate the dissertation as a conflictful rite de passage and to critique doctoral projects that unrefexively adopt “technical formulas” for success and thus deny the possibility of liminal transformation

Introduction: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Sociological Perspective on Ethics and Society

Social Ethics: Sociology and the Future of Society provides a complex yet accessible statement of Charlotte Perkins Gilman\u27s mature sociological theory of ethical life. Her perspective is welded intellectually to sociology and evolutionary thought and concretely to the well-being of children throughout the world. We have failed, writes Gilman in Social Ethics, to teach even a simple, child-convincing ethics based on social interactions, because we have not understood sociology (emphasis added). For Gilman, a world in which children are not loved, well fed, properly clothed, thoughtfully educated, and humanely disciplined is a world ethically at odds with logic and itself. From this fundamental premise, all else follows. Thus: war, barbarism, waste, religious bigotry, conspicuous consumption, greed, environmental degradation, preventable diseases, and patriarchal oppression in all its manifestations-all these for Gilman are highly unethical and must not be allowed to stand if society is to be a good place for children. If, as readers of Social Ethics, we sense that we are being firmly lectured as well as cajoled by Gilman\u27s penetrating wit and obvious intellect-that is because we are. Gilman pulls no punches, she really intends us to change our ways, and to use sociological insights to improve our future society. Social Ethics first appeared in 1914 in serial form in Gilman\u27s extraordinary pedagogical experiment in adult education, a self-published monthly sociological journal, issued from 1909 to 1916, written entirely by Gilman and called, aptly enough, The Forerunner

Centenary of the First Sociology Doctorate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

On June 10,1905, the Faculty of the Graduate School in the University of Nebraska formally recommended that Anderson William Clark “receive the degree of Doctor of Philosophy” in Sociology.’ Clark, who had completed a dissertation on “State Control and Supervision of Charities and Corrections,” was a Baptist minister and the founding Superintendent of Omaha’s Child Saving Institute.2 Based on extensive firsthand observations, interviews, and examinations of records in Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and other states, Clark concluded, “Immediate state control is demanded in order to save the lives of thousands of infants and small children who are today in the hands of ignorant and sentimental nurses and caretakers, where they suffer from poor ventilation, unsuitable food, and bad sanitary conditions. . . . State control is required to correct such abuses”(pp. 39% 399). Clark’s dissertation exemplified the practical applications of sociology emphasized by Amos G. Warner, a former Nebraskan, in his influential 1894 work, American Charities: A Study in Philanthropy and Economics

Doctoral Dissertations as Liminal Journeys of the Self: Betwixt and Between in Graduate Sociology Programs

The sociology dissertation process is a liminal journey, a passage characterized by ambiguity, uncertainty, and crisis in which the student self is abandoned and a new professional self claims a world of power. authority, maturity, and responsibility. The theoretical perspectives of Victor Turner, Arnold Van Gennep, and George H. Mead are extended to conceptualize the “liminal self who undertakes this difficult and problematic journey of transformation. Experiential methodology, in which theory and autobiography are combined, is employed to explicate the dissertation as a conflictful rite de passage and to critique doctoral projects that unrefexively adopt “technical formulas” for success and thus deny the possibility of liminal transformation