College Republicans and Conservative Social Identity

Through participant-observation and interviews, I explore the conservative social identity of College Republicans at a midsize, midtier public university in the United States. Using the concepts of repertoires and frames, I analyze how individuals make claims to political social identities. Specifically, I show that symbolic appeals to the free market were an essential aspect of the conservative repertoire at my field site. Furthermore, the shifting and contradictory frames used by the College Republicans in this study demonstrate that their discursive political practices were not primarily about policy preferences; they were about affirming a conservative social identity. Understanding how stated policy preferences and identity intertwine in everyday political talk has important implications for American democracy

Hollywood, Bike Messengers, and the New Economy

The sociological study of popular cinema provides an analytic entry point for exploring how economic realities are given meaning through cultural products. In this paper, I compare how two Hollywood movies about bike messengers, Quicksilver and Premium Rush, position their main characters in relationship to the new economy. Both films provide commentaries on work and social class, but, as products of unique socio-historical periods, I argue that their commentaries differ significantly. Produced in the 1980s, Quicksilver uses messengering as a form of middle-class redemption, allowing the protagonist to return to the world of capitalist finance. By contrast, as a product of the Great Recession, Premium Rush offers a utopian vision of self-determination for low-wage service workers at the same time that it reifies the uncertainty, unpredictability, and riskiness that increasingly characterize American labor. I also show that both films converge in their portrayal of women and working-class blacks

Bike Messengers and the Really Real: Effervescence, Reflexivity, and Postmodern Identity

Out of more than two thousand bike messengers in New York City, a few hundred participate in alleycats—illegal races held in open traffic. Surrounding this racing scene is a vibrant messenger community. Messengers who race in or attend alleycats carry their messenger identity into all aspects of their lives. Through direct participant observation, this article proposes that alleycats function as Durkheimian rituals for these messengers. Alleycats express the central values of the social world. Lost in collective effervescence, the individual confronts these values as objectified truths, which allow messengers to form stable identities. Further, bicycles, messenger bags, and other objects become sacred symbols within this ritualization process. The ability of messengers to construct such nonreflexive identities is juxtaposed with theories about the self in postmodernity

Parkour, the affective appropriation of urban space, and the real/virtual dialectic

Parkour is a new sport based on athletically and artistically overcoming urban obstacles. In this paper, I argue that the real world practices of parkour are dialectically intertwined with the virtual worlds made possible by information and communication technologies. My analysis of parkour underscores how globalized ideas and images available through the Internet and other media can be put into practice within specific locales. Practitioners of parkour, therefore, engage their immediate, physical world at the same time that they draw upon an imagination enabled by their on-screen lives. As such, urban researchers need to consider the ways that virtual worlds can change and enhance how individuals understand and utilize the material spaces of the city. EMPLACEMENT IN A VIRTUAL WORLD With the increasing integration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into our lives, more and more of our daily interactions take place "on screen&quot

Precipitable Water Variability Using SSM/I and GOES VAS Pathfinder Data Sets

Determining moisture variability for all weather scenes is critical to understanding the earth's hydrologic cycle and global climate changes. Remote sensing from geostationary satellites provides the necessary temporal and spatial resolutions necessary for global change studies. Due to antenna size constraints imposed with the use of microwave radiometers, geostationary satellites have carried instruments passively measuring radiation at infrared wavelengths or shorter. The shortfall of using infrared instruments in moisture studies lies in its inability to sense terrestrial radiation through clouds. Microwave emissions, on the other hand, are mostly unaffected by cloudy atmospheres. Land surface emissivity at microwave frequencies exhibit both high temporal and spatial variability thus confining moisture retrievals at microwave frequencies to over marine atmospheres (a near uniform cold background). This study intercompares the total column integrated water content Precipitable Water, (PW) as derived from both the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) VISSR Atmospheric Sounder (VAS) pathfinder data sets. PW is a bulk parameter often used to quantify moisture variability and is important to understanding the earth's hydrologic cycle and climate system. This research has been spawned in an effort to combine two different algorithms which together can lead to a more comprehensive quantification of global water vapor. The approach taken here is to intercompare two independent PW retrieval algorithms and to validate the resultant retrievals against an existing data set, namely the European Center for Medium range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) model analysis data

Climate simulation of the latest Permian: Implications for mass extinction

This report presents the results of climate modeling research which indicates that elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the end of the Permian period led to climatic conditions inhospitable to both marine and terrestrial life. The Permian-Triassic boundary (about 251 million years ago) was the time of the largest known mass extinction in Earth's history, when greater than ninety percent of all marine species, and approximately seventy percent of all terrestrial species, died out. The model, which used paleogeography and paleotopography correct for the time period, indicated that warm high-latitude surface air temperatures and elevated carbon dioxide levels may have resulted in slowed circulation and stagnant, anoxic conditions in Earth's oceans. The report also suggests that the excess carbon dioxide (and sulfur dioxide) may have originated from volcanic activity associated with eruption of the Siberian Trap flood basalts, which took place at the same time. Educational levels: Undergraduate lower division, Undergraduate upper division, Graduate or professional

Project ATLANTA (ATlanta Land-use ANalysis: Temperature and Air quality): A Study of how the Urban Landscape Affects Meteorology and Air Quality Through Time

It is our intent through this investigation to help facilitate measures that can be Project ATLANTA (ATlanta Land-use ANalysis: applied to mitigate climatological or air quality Temperature and Air-quality) is a NASA Earth degradation, or to design alternate measures to sustain Observing System (EOS) Interdisciplinary Science or improve the overall urban environment in the future. investigation that seeks to observe, measure, model, and analyze how the rapid growth of the Atlanta. The primary objectives for this research effort are: 1) To In the last half of the 20th century, Atlanta, investigate and model the relationship between Atlanta Georgia has risen as the premier commercial, urban growth, land cover change, and the development industrial, and transportation urban area of the of the urban heat island phenomenon through time at southeastern United States. The rapid growth of the nested spatial scales from local to regional; 2) To Atlanta area, particularly within the last 25 years, has investigate and model the relationship between Atlanta made Atlanta one of the fastest growing metropolitan urban growth and land cover change on air quality areas in the United States. The population of the through time at nested spatial scales from local to Atlanta metropolitan area increased 27% between 1970 regional; and 3) To model the overall effects of urban and 1980, and 33% between 1980-1990 (Research development on surface energy budget characteristics Atlanta, Inc., 1993). Concomitant with this high rate of across the Atlanta urban landscape through time at population growth, has been an explosive growth in nested spatial scales from local to regional. Our key retail, industrial, commercial, and transportation goal is to derive a better scientific understanding of how services within the Atlanta region. This has resulted in land cover changes associated with urbanization in the tremendous land cover change dynamics within the Atlanta area, principally in transforming forest lands to metropolitan region, wherein urbanization has urban land covers through time, has, and will, effect consumed vast acreas of land adjacent to the city local and regional climate, surface energy flux, and air proper and has pushed the rural/urban fringe farther quality characteristics. Allied with this goal is the and farther away from the original Atlanta urban core. prospect that the results from this research can be An enormous transition of land from forest and applied by urban planners, environmental managers agriculture to urban land uses has occurred in the and other decision-makers, for determining how Atlanta area in the last 25 years, along with subsequent urbanization has impacted the climate and overal

Final Report: Investigation of Catalytic Pathways for Lignin Breakdown into Monomers and Fuels

Lignin is a biopolymer that comprises up to 35% of woody biomass by dry weight. It is currently underutilized compared to cellulose and hemicellulose, the other two primary components of woody biomass. Lignin has an irregular structure of methoxylated aromatic groups linked by a suite of ether and alkyl bonds which makes it difficult to degrade selectively. However, the aromatic components of lignin also make it promising as a base material for the production of aromatic fuel additives and cyclic chemical feed stocks such as styrene, benzene, and cyclohexanol. Our laboratory research focused on three methods to selectively cleave and deoxygenate purified lignin under mild conditions: acidolysis, hydrogenation and electrocatalysis. (1) Acidolysis was undertaken in CH2Cl2 at room temperature. (2) Hydrogenation was carried out by dissolving lignin and a rhodium catalyst in 1:1 water:methoxyethanol under a 1 atm H2 environment. (3) Electrocatalysis of lignin involved reacting electrically generated hydrogen atoms at a catalytic palladium cathode with lignin dissolved in a solution of aqueous methanol. In all of the experiments, the lignin degradation products were identified and quantified by gas chromatography mass spectroscopy and flame ionization detection. Yields were low, but this may have reflected the difficulty in recovering the various fractions after conversion. The homogeneous hydrogenation of lignin showed fragmentation into monomers, while the electrocatalytic hydrogenation showed production of polyaromatic hydrocarbons and substituted benzenes. In addition to the experiments, promising pathways for the conversion of lignin were assessed. Three conversion methods were compared based on their material and energy inputs and proposed improvements using better catalyst and process technology. A variety of areas were noted as needing further experimental and theoretical effort to increase the feasibility of lignin conversion to fuels

Grazing Collisions of Black Holes via the Excision of Singularities

We present the first simulations of non-headon (grazing) collisions of binary black holes in which the black hole singularities have been excised from the computational domain. Initially two equal mass black holes $m$ are separated a distance $\approx10m$ and with impact parameter $\approx2m$. Initial data are based on superposed, boosted (velocity $\approx0.5c$) solutions of single black holes in Kerr-Schild coordinates. Both rotating and non-rotating black holes are considered. The excised regions containing the singularities are specified by following the dynamics of apparent horizons. Evolutions of up to $t \approx 35m$ are obtained in which two initially separate apparent horizons are present for $t\approx3.8m$. At that time a single enveloping apparent horizon forms, indicating that the holes have merged. Apparent horizon area estimates suggest gravitational radiation of about 2.6% of the total mass. The evolutions end after a moderate amount of time because of instabilities.Comment: 2 References corrected, reference to figure update