Ontological imagination: transcending methodological solipsism and the promise of interdisciplinary studies

This text is a presentation of the notion of ontological imagination. It constitutes an attempt to merge two traditions: critical sociology and science and technology studies - STS. By contrasting these two intellectual traditions, I attempt to bring together: a humanist ethical-political sensitivity and a posthumanist ontological insight. My starting point is the premise that contemporary world needs new social ontology and new critical theory based on it in order to overcome the unconsciously adapted, “slice-based” modernist vision of social ontology. I am convinced that we need new ontological frameworks of the social combined with a research disposition which I refer to as ontological imagination

On coarse embeddability into ℓp\ell_p-spaces and a conjecture of Dranishnikov

We show that the Hilbert space is coarsely embeddable into any $\ell_p$ for $1\le p<\infty$. In particular, this yields new characterizations of embeddability of separable metric spaces into the Hilbert space.Comment: 5 page

A mean-square bound for the lattice discrepancy of bodies of rotation with flat points on the boundary

Let B denote a three-dimensional body of rotation, with respect to one coordinate axis, whose boundary is sufficiently smooth and of bounded nonzero Gaussian curvature throughout, except for the two boundary points on the axis of rotation, where the curvature may vanish. For a large real variable t, we are interested in the number A(t) of integer points in the linearly dilated body tB, in particular in the lattice discrepancy P(t) = A(t) - volume(tB). We are able to evaluate the contribution of the boundary points of curvature zero to P(t), with a remainder that is fairly small in mean-square.Comment: 16 page

Study of air pollutant signatures for remote sensing

Experimental results are presented for a possible new, indirect signature for air pollutants: the spectral reflectivity of plant leaves. Sub-visual changes (up to 160%) in the spectral reflectivity of bean and tobacco leaves were observed over the range 475nm to 750nm in response to SO2 exposures such as 2ppm/4hrs or 4ppm/16hrs, or to O3 exposures such as 90pphm/21hrs or 7.5pphm/292hrs. Such changes might be observed from a satellite using either laser or sunlight as the illumination source. Inasmuch as the plants appear to become acclimated to some of these exposure doses, environmental changes may be most important for this type of plant-response

Diffusion and structural changes in microcircuit interconnections

The interdiffusion of platimum and gold films, a couple utilized in beam lead microcircuits, has been studied for temperatures up to 550 C. Gold-on-platinum couples and separate platimum and gold films 80-450 nm thick, were deposited by electron beam evaporation onto oxidized (111) silicon substrates. Diffusion was monitored by means of spectral reflectance versus wavelength in the band 500-1000 nm. The separate metal films showed good adhesion and stable reflectances (after an initial change) for at least 6 h at diffusion temperatures, in contrast to the couples. Analysis of platinum diffusion through the gold films yielded an activation energy about 38 kcal/g-atom and a pre-exponential factor of the order 0.001 sq cm/sec, values close to those for volume diffusion. The pre-exponential factor especially is dependent upon film deposition conditions

Aperiodic tilings of manifolds of intermediate growth

We give a homological construction of aperiodic tiles for certain open Riemannian surfaces admitting actions of Grigorchuk groups of intermediate growth.Comment: Accepted for publication in Groups, Geometry and Dynamic