Las Vegas as a Symbol: Goffman and Competing Narratives of Sin City

Dmitri Shalin has demonstrated the importance of Erving Goffman to the field of sociology, and in this case to the sociology of Las Vegas as a gambling, resort, and urban center. But Goffman also was part of a trend, or more accurately what became a trend, and he played an important role in it. When Goffman came to Las Vegas in the late 1950s and early 1960s in connection with his field work as a downtown casino dealer, “the city of non-homes,” as he called it, was at a turning point in a variety of ways. When he published his findings in the late 1960s, including his essay “Where the Action Is,” Las Vegas was positioned for another turning point that he helped to coax onward: becoming an important field for scholarship. This essay attempts to explain the Las Vegas in which Goffman found himself, and the Las Vegas whose understanding he went on to enhance with the publication of his work

D-instanton induced interactions on a D3-brane

Non-perturbative features of the derivative expansion of the effective action of a single D3-brane are obtained by considering scattering amplitudes of open and closed strings. This motivates expressions for the coupling constant dependence of world-volume interactions of the form $(\partial F)^4$ (where F is the Born-Infeld field strength), $(\partial^2\phi)^4$ (where $\phi$ are the normal coordinates of the D3-brane) and other interactions related by \calN=4 supersymmetry. These include terms that transform with non-trivial modular weight under Montonen-Olive duality. The leading D-instanton contributions that enter into these effective interactions are also shown to follow from an explicit stringy construction of the moduli space action for the D-instanton/D3-brane system in the presence of D3-brane open-string sources (but in the absence of a background antisymmetric tensor potential). Extending this action to include closed-string sources leads to a unified description of non-perturbative terms in the effective action of the form (embedding curvature)$^2$ together with open-string interactions that describe contributions of the second fundamental form.Comment: 40 pages, harvmac (b), some typos corrected and references adde

The radial distributions of a heavy-light meson on a lattice

In an earlier work, the charge (vector) and matter (scalar) radial distributions of heavy-light mesons were measured in the quenched approximation on a 16^3 times 24 lattice with a quark-gluon coupling of 5.7, a lattice spacing of 0.17 fm, and a hopping parameter corresponding to a light quark mass about that of the strange quark. Several improvements are now made: 1) The configurations are generated using dynamical fermions with a quark-gluon coupling of 5.2 (a lattice spacing of 0.14 fm); 2) Many more gauge configurations are included (78 compared with the earlier 20); 3) The distributions at many off-axis, in addition to on-axis, points are measured; 4) The data-analysis is much more complete. In particular, distributions involving excited states are extracted. The exponential decay of the charge and matter distributions can be described by mesons of mass 0.9+-0.1 and 1.5+-0.1 GeV respectively - values that are consistent with those of vector and scalar qqbar-states calculated directly with the same lattice parameters.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figures, Lattice2002(heavyquark

A GAS OF D-INSTANTONS

A D-instanton is a space-time event associated with world-sheet boundaries that contributes non-perturbative effects of order $e^{-const/\kappa}$ to closed-string amplitudes. Some properties of a gas of D-instantons are discussed in this paper.Comment: 11 Pages and 3 figures in uuencoded fil

[Review of] Francis Paul Prucha, Indian-White Relations in the United States: A Bibliography of Works Published, 1975-1980

This volume is the long-awaited supplement to Francis Paul Prucha\u27s Bibliographical Guide to the History of Indian-White Relations in the United States, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1977. That work, which contained 9705 items, was complete to 1975. The supplement, with 3400 titles, covers the historical literature made available between 1975 and 1980. Organized into fifteen subject divisions and excellently cross-referenced with a thirty-six page index, the supplement continues the same high quality of Prucha\u27s previous efforts to bring some useable order to the bewildering complexity of American Indian historiography

Boundary Effects in String Theory

Some of the properties of string theory defined on world-sheets with boundaries are reviewed. Particular emphasis is put on the possibility of identifying string configurations (\lq D-instantons' and \lq D-branes') that give rise to stringy non-perturbative effects.Comment: Talk presented at the Strings '95 Conference, USC (March 1995). Latex, 10 page