Sprint and the Shutdown of La Conexion Familiar: A Union-Hating Multinational Finds Nowhere to Run

[Excerpt] Sprint chairman William T. Esrey has a dream: a long-distance phone company whose fiber-optic tentacles snake across the globe to embrace European and Asian partners, snaring a chunk of the projected $30 billion market for such global corporate networks. The workers fired en masse from Sprint\u27s San Francisco-based La Conexion Familiar subsidiary, thwarted in their attempt to unionize, have their own dreams: among them, receiving reparations for the wrongs dealt to them by Sprint, and keeping their families out of homeless shelters. The chasm between these dreams illustrates the bitter truth about the global economy: while the heads of executives spin with plans for ever-larger money-making enterprises, the workers on whose backs these schemes are erected face a harsh reality: increased union-busting, job losses, lower wages, and worsening working conditions

Gapatistas Win a Victory

[Excerpt] The generic Central American shopping mall is an air-conditioned ark of plate glass and aluminum, tightly sealed against the city\u27s boiling sea of poverty. Inside, scrubbed and suspicious cafeteria employees serve up expensive meals on orange trays. My lunch companion today is a young labor rights activist, in a country where military death squads run by big business have murdered thousands of union members. Currently a student of labor law, he has risked life and limb for the cause of international solidarity. It is the rule in this region of the world —much more so than in the U.S. — that to take on the boss is to play with your life. A couple years ago, he says, as I left work downtown, a truck pulled up behind me. Three guys in civilian clothes jumped out, forced me into my car, and made me to crouch down on my hands and knees. They were hitting me with their pistols and swearing at me. I was swearing back at them, to provoke them. I wanted them to kill me right there, not take me some place for torture. He has also witnessed how U.S. labor is in the cross hairs. Incredulously, he describes being clubbed by the Los Angeles police at a Justice for Janitors rally. I couldn\u27t believe it — I didnt know the police were allowed to do that in the United States! he exclaims. Like other labor activists throughout the Americas, he is hoping that U.S. unions will invest more in strategic international campaigns. This, to him, is the key to saving lives, jobs, and living standards. His question is urgent: How are we going to link workers\u27 struggles from country to country

A biosemiotic conversation: Between physics and semiotics

In this dialogue, we discuss the contrast between inexorable physical laws and the semiotic freedom of life. We agree that material and symbolic structures require complementary descriptions, as do the many hierarchical levels of their organizations. We try to clarify our concepts of laws, constraints, rules, symbols, memory, interpreters, and semiotic control. We briefly describe our different personal backgrounds that led us to a biosemiotic approach, and we speculate on the future directions of biosemiotics

Attaching of strain gages to substrates

A method and apparatus for attaching strain gages to substrates is described. A strain gage having a backing plate is attached to a substrate by using a foil of brazing material between the backing plate and substrate. A pair of electrodes that are connected to a current source, are applied to opposite sides of the backing plate, so that heating of the structure occurs primarily along the relatively highly conductive foil of brazing material. Field installations are facilitated by utilizing a backing plate with wings extending at an upward incline from either side of the backing plate, by attaching the electrodes to the wings to perform the brazing operation, and by breaking off the wings after the brazing is completed

Characterization of exothermic brazing components Skylab experiment M552

Information developed to characterize flight and ground based samples from the Exothermic Brazing Experiment is detailed. Included is information developed from metallographic observation, chemical analysis, and measurements of component dimensions. Comparisons of the flight and ground based specimens showed that good quality brazes were obtained. Effects of the zero gravity processing were noted on liquid metal flow and braze alloy-base metal reactions. Unusual metallurgical structures exhibited in the nickel brazes made in Skylab were the result of composition variations apparently related to the time-temperature cycle characteristic of this braze

Development of explosive welding procedures to fabricate channeled nozzle structures

Research was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of fabricating a large contoured structure with complex internal channeling by explosive welding procedures. Structures or nozzles of this nature for wind tunnel applications were designed. Such nozzles vary widely in their complexity. However, in their simplest form, they consist of a grooved base section to which a cover sheet is attached to form a series of internal cooling passages. The cover sheet attachment can be accomplished in various ways: fusion welding, brazing, and diffusion welding. The cover sheet has also been electroformed in place. Of these fabrication methods, brazing has proved most successful in producing nozzles with complex contoured surfaces and a multiplicity of internal channels

Analysis of thermal stresses and metal movement during welding

Finite element computer programs were developed to determine thermal stresses and metal movement during butt welding of flat plates and bead-on-plate welding along the girth of a cylindrical shell. Circular cylindrical shells of 6061 aluminum alloy were used for the tests. Measurements were made of changes in temperature and thermal strains during the welding process

The Physics of Symbols Evolved Before Consciousness

The human brain appears to be the most complex structure for its size in the known universe. Consequently, studies of the brain have required many models and theories at many levels that involve disciplines from basic physics, to neurosciences, psychology and philosophy. For over 2000 years the two most controversial and unresolved models of brain phenomena involve what we call free will and consciousness. I argue that adequate models at all levels require epistemic complementarity – distinct necessary models that are not derivable or reducible to each other. The primitive irreducible complementarity at all levels is the subject-object distinction required by an epistemic cut. This complementarity first arises with self-replication where a self, the subject, must be distinguished from the non-self, the objec