If All the People Are Banded Together : The Naugatuck Valley project

[Excerpt] The Naugatuck Valley in western Connecticut was once the center of the American brass industry and one of the most intensely industrialized areas on earth. From its center in Waterbury, the region\u27s major city, with a population of 100,000, the Valley runs north through the towns of Thomaston and Torrington and south through Naugatuck, Seymour, Derby and Ansonia. Like so many industrial areas of the Northeast and Midwest, its workers are primarily the descendants of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, with more recent additions of Blacks from the South and Puerto Ricans. During the 1960s and \u2770s it could have been renamed deindustrial valley, as dozens of plants were sold or closed. Like those in similar areas elsewhere, the people of the Naugatuck Valley have found that their established approaches have given them little leverage over deindustrialization. Conventional union tactics have exerted little influence over companies prepared to close up or sell the shop. Legislation to affect plant closings has been difficult to pass, and when passed has had limited impact. Local communities have felt powerless in the face of decisions made in distant board rooms; until recently, few efforts have been made to affect those decisions, even when they threatened the lifeblood of Naugatuck Valley communities. Over the past three years, the Valley has developed a regional organization of more than 50 religious, labor, community and small business organizations. Called the Naugatuck Valley Project, its purpose is to give workers and communities more influence over their economic destiny

On the primordial condensation and accretion environment and the remanent magnetization of meteorites

In the context of various models for the early evolution of a solar nebula, the possible roles assigned to ambient magnetic fields and the paleointensities required to establish the stable natural remanent magnetization observed in meteorites, are discussed. It is suggested that the record of paleofields present during condensation, growth, and accumulation of grains is likely to have been preserved as chemical or thermochemical remanence in unaltered meteoritic material. Fine particle theories appear adequate for treating meteoritic remanence, if models based on corresponding types of permanent magnet materials, e.g., powder ferrites for chondrites and diffusion hardened alloys for iron meteorites, are adopted

On the Eleven-Dimensional Origins of Polarized D0-branes

The worldvolume theory of a D0-brane contains a multiplet of fermions which can couple to background spacetime fields. This coupling implies that a D0-brane may possess multipole moments with respect to the various type IIA supergravity fields. Different such polarization states of the D0-brane will thus generate different long-range supergravity fields, and the corresponding semi-classical supergravity solutions will have different geometries. In this paper, we reconsider such solutions from an eleven-dimensional perspective. We thus begin by deriving the ``superpartners'' of the eleven-dimensional graviton. These superpartners are obtained by acting on the purely bosonic solution with broken supersymmetries and, in theory, one can obtain the full BPS supermultiplet of states. When we dimensionally reduce a polarized supergraviton along its direction of motion, we recover a metric which describes a polarized D0-brane. On the other hand, if we compactify along the retarded null direction we obtain the short distance, or ``near-horizon'', geometry of a polarized D0-brane, which is related to finite $N$ Matrix theory. The various dipole moments in this case can only be defined once the eleven-dimensional metric is ``regularized'' and, even then, they are formally infinite. We argue, however, that this is to be expected in such a non-asymptotically flat spacetime. Moreover, we find that the superpartners of the D0-brane, in this r \ra 0 limit, possess neither spin nor D2-brane dipole moments.Comment: 20 pages, LaTeX. More references added, and a correction made to the supercharge. Version to be published in JHE

A New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old?

[Excerpt] A lot has changed since the formation of the AFL-CIO 40 years ago. A regulated national economy has been transformed into a global economy — one in which American workers can be put into competition with others anywhere in the world. Corporations have decentralized their activities, downsized their in-house operations, and outsourced their production even while concentrating their power around the globe. Large urban industrial complexes like Detroit and Pittsburgh have been replaced by small, highly mobile production units, which can easily be relocated. White men have become the minority of the U.S. workforce and women and people of color the majority

BPS States of the Non-Abelian Born-Infeld Action

We argue that the trace structure of the non-abelian Born-Infeld action can be fixed by demanding that the action be linearised by certain energy-minimising BPS-like configurations. It is shown how instantons in D4-branes, SU(2) monopoles and dyons in D3-branes, and vortices in D2-branes are all BPS states of the action recently proposed by Tseytlin. The T-dual worldvolume theories of D-strings and D0-branes are also considered. All such configurations can be dealt with exactly within the context of non-abelian Born-Infeld theory since, given the relevant BPS-like condition, the action reduces to that of Yang-Mills theory. The worldvolume energy of such configurations is an absolute minimum. It would seem, moreover, that such an analysis holds for the symmetrised trace structure of Tseytlin's proposal only.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX. Much condensed version to appear in Phys. Lett.