Vibration-induced climbing of drops

We report an experimental study of liquid drops moving against gravity, when placed on a vertically vibrating inclined plate, which is partially wetted by the drop. The frequency of vibrations ranges from 30 to 200 Hz, and, above a threshold in vibration acceleration, drops experience an upward motion. We attribute this surprising motion to the deformations of the drop, as a consequence of an up or down symmetry breaking induced by the presence of the substrate. We relate the direction of motion to contact angle measurements. This phenomenon can be used to move a drop along an arbitrary path in a plane, without special surface treatments or localized forcing.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figure

Characteristic Angles in the Wetting of an Angular Region: Deposit Growth

As was shown in an earlier paper [1], solids dispersed in a drying drop migrate to the (pinned) contact line. This migration is caused by outward flows driven by the loss of the solvent due to evaporation and by geometrical constraint that the drop maintains an equilibrium surface shape with a fixed boundary. Here, in continuation of our earlier paper [2], we theoretically investigate the evaporation rate, the flow field and the rate of growth of the deposit patterns in a drop over an angular sector on a plane substrate. Asymptotic power laws near the vertex (as distance to the vertex goes to zero) are obtained. A hydrodynamic model of fluid flow near the singularity of the vertex is developed and the velocity field is obtained. The rate of the deposit growth near the contact line is found in two time regimes. The deposited mass falls off as a weak power Gamma of distance close to the vertex and as a stronger power Beta of distance further from the vertex. The power Gamma depends only slightly on the opening angle Alpha and stays between roughly -1/3 and 0. The power Beta varies from -1 to 0 as the opening angle increases from 0 to 180 degrees. At a given distance from the vertex, the deposited mass grows faster and faster with time, with the greatest increase in the growth rate occurring at the early stages of the drying process.Comment: v1: 36 pages, 21 figures, LaTeX; submitted to Physical Review E; v2: minor additions to Abstract and Introductio

The emergence of commercial genomics: analysis of the rise of a biotechnology subsector during the Human Genome Project, 1990 to 2004.

BackgroundDevelopment of the commercial genomics sector within the biotechnology industry relied heavily on the scientific commons, public funding, and technology transfer between academic and industrial research. This study tracks financial and intellectual property data on genomics firms from 1990 through 2004, thus following these firms as they emerged in the era of the Human Genome Project and through the 2000 to 2001 market bubble.MethodsA database was created based on an early survey of genomics firms, which was expanded using three web-based biotechnology services, scientific journals, and biotechnology trade and technical publications. Financial data for publicly traded firms was collected through the use of four databases specializing in firm financials. Patent searches were conducted using firm names in the US Patent and Trademark Office website search engine and the DNA Patent Database.ResultsA biotechnology subsector of genomics firms emerged in parallel to the publicly funded Human Genome Project. Trends among top firms show that hiring, capital improvement, and research and development expenditures continued to grow after a 2000 to 2001 bubble. The majority of firms are small businesses with great diversity in type of research and development, products, and services provided. Over half the public firms holding patents have the majority of their intellectual property portfolio in DNA-based patents.ConclusionsThese data allow estimates of investment, research and development expenditures, and jobs that paralleled the rise of genomics as a sector within biotechnology between 1990 and 2004

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

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