“I’m Here to Do Business. I’m Not Here to Play Games.” Work, Consumption, and Masculinity in \u3ci\u3eStorage Wars\u3c/i\u3e

This essay examines the first season of Storage Wars and suggests the program helps mediate the putative crisis in American masculinity by suggesting that traditional male skills are still essential where knowledge supplants manual labor. We read representations of “men at work” in traditionally “feminine” consumer markets, as a form of masculine recuperation situated within the culture of White male injury. Specifically, Storage Wars appropriates omnivorous consumption, thrift, and collaboration to fit within the masculine repertoire of self-reliance, individualism, and competition. Thus, the program adapts hegemonic masculinity by showcasing male auction bidders adeptly performing feminine consumer practices. Whether the feminine is assimilated into the male body or represented as its Other, we contend that the expressions of masculinity in Storage Wars render women obsolete and subjugated in the marketplaces of the 21st-century economy and contribute to the mediation of the contemporary crisis in masculinity

Closed geodesics on connected sums and 3-manifolds

We study the asymptotics of the number N(t) of geometrically distinct closed geodesics of a Riemannian or Finsler metric on a connected sum of two compact manifolds of dimension at least three with non-trivial fundamental groups and apply this result to the prime decomposition of a three-manifold. In particular we show that the function N(t) grows at least like the prime numbers on a compact 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group. It follows that a generic Riemannian metric on a compact 3-manifold has infinitely many geometrically distinct closed geodesics. We also consider the case of a connected sum of a compact manifold with positive first Betti number and a simply-connected manifold which is not homeomorphic to a sphere.Comment: 15 page

Reversing a granular flow on a vibratory conveyor

Experimental results are presented on the transport properties of granular materials on a vibratory conveyor. For circular oscillations of the shaking trough a non-monotonous dependence of the transport velocity on the normalized acceleration is observed. Two maxima are separated by a regime, where the granular flow is much slower and, in a certain driving range, even reverses its direction. A similar behavior is found for a single solid body with a low coefficient of restitution, whereas an individual glass bead of 1 mm diameter is propagated in the same direction for all accelerations.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Applied Physics Letter

“Get Rich or Die Buying:” The Travails of the Working-Class Auction Bidder

A critique of the popular reality television show, Storage Wars

Comparative response to selection of two reciprocal recurrent procedures in BS21 and BS22 maize populations

Reciprocal recurrent selection (RRS) has proven to be a successful method to improve the performance of a cross population and to increase the heterosis between populations. However, RRS has not been widely adopted by the commercial breeders because RRS is not as efficient to recover inbred lines as other methods of inbred development. Use of two lines as testers instead of the opposite population as reciprocal tester in an RRS scheme could overcome this limitation;A breeding research program was initiated in 1974 at Iowa State University to evaluate the modified RRS (MRRS) procedure and RRS in BS21 and BS22 maize populations. The modification used inbred line A632 as tester for BS21 and inbred line H99 as tester for BS22;After six cycles of selection were completed in BS21 and BS22 using MRRS and RRS, an experiment was conducted to evaluate the response to selection. The populations per se, testcrosses to inbred testers, and crosses between cycle populations of RRS and MRRS were evaluated in replicated yield trials;There were significant increases in grain yield in all six cross populations as a consequence of selection. The rate of direct response was greater for the RRS procedure than for the MRRS (4.4, 1.6, and 2.8%cycle-1 for BS21(R)xBS22(R), H99xBS22(HI), and A632xBS21(HI), respectively). RRS was as effective as MRRS to improve the grain yield of the populations in crosses with the inbred lines, but MRRS was not as effective as RRS to improve the cross population BS21xBS22, with a significantly lower rate of increase in yield of 1.6%cycle-1. Realized heritability and response to selection for yield were 25 to 50% of their predicted values;In this study there was no evidence that the genetic variance among testcrosses for yield was greater when using inbred lines as testers than when using populations as tester. The traditional RRS procedure was more effective than MRRS to improve grain yield in the cross population BS21xBS22

Strong-Tie Social Connections Versus Weak-Tie Social Connections

Discussions regarding the strength of social ties relate to social capital theory. As Robert Putnam describes it, social capital theory suggests that social networks have value at the micro (individual), meso (community), and macro (societal) levels. An individual\u27s social network is comprised of multiple, multiplex social ties of varying strengths. Strong ties exist among individuals connected within densely knit, homogenous networks such as those involving kin and close friends. Weak ties exist among individuals connected within sparse, heterogeneous networks such as those involving acquaintances

Fluctuations in the level density of a Fermi gas

We present a theory that accurately describes the counting of excited states of a noninteracting fermionic gas. At high excitation energies the results reproduce Bethe's theory. At low energies oscillatory corrections to the many--body density of states, related to shell effects, are obtained. The fluctuations depend non-trivially on energy and particle number. Universality and connections with Poisson statistics and random matrix theory are established for regular and chaotic single--particle motion.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing refers to the application of traditional word-of-mouth marketing to the online environment. Originally developed by Steve Jurvetson and Tim Draper in 1997, the term is used to describe online techniques designed to generate peer-to-peer conversation and buzz about a company, brand, product, or service. A message that contains something of value or appeal is diffused throughout members of a given social network, and ideally across networks, in an exponential fashion, much like the spread of a virus in medical parlance. The rapid adoption of digital and social media tools by politicians has led to an increased visibility and impact of viral marketing efforts in political campaigns, particularly since the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. Common viral marketing techniques include, but are not limited to, a systematic and strategic deployment of viral e-mail messages, You Tube videos, blogs, microblogs (such as Twitter), social networking Web sites, podcasts, online games, and text messages

Constructing Lumbersexuality: Marketing an Emergent Masculine Taste Regime

This article examines the online retailer Huckberry.com as a singular, centralized authority responsible for marketing “lumbersexuality” as an emergent, gender-normative taste regime. As an evolution of the devalued hipster marketplace myth, analysis reveals Huckberry promotes an adaptable taste regime to its young, educated, urban, White male clientele that unites goods, meanings, and practices across multiple fields of consumption that reconnect indie consumption and taste with a fantasy of “authentic” masculinity. We argue that Huckberry offers men semiotic resources that merge the urban with the outdoors in a way that enables the enactment of a fraught though seemingly durable masculine identity project that weaves the extraordinary and mythological into the quotidian. Implications of this gendered taste regime are discussed in relationship to the ways in which lumbersexuality is mobilized as a more authentically masculine alternative to the ironic stance of hipsterism and the supposed phoniness of mass culture