Epitaxial Frustration in Deposited Packings of Rigid Disks and Spheres

We use numerical simulation to investigate and analyze the way that rigid disks and spheres arrange themselves when compressed next to incommensurate substrates. For disks, a movable set is pressed into a jammed state against an ordered fixed line of larger disks, where the diameter ratio of movable to fixed disks is 0.8. The corresponding diameter ratio for the sphere simulations is 0.7, where the fixed substrate has the structure of a (001) plane of a face-centered cubic array. Results obtained for both disks and spheres exhibit various forms of density-reducing packing frustration next to the incommensurate substrate, including some cases displaying disorder that extends far from the substrate. The disk system calculations strongly suggest that the most efficient (highest density) packings involve configurations that are periodic in the lateral direction parallel to the substrate, with substantial geometric disruption only occurring near the substrate. Some evidence has also emerged suggesting that for the sphere systems a corresponding structure doubly periodic in the lateral directions would yield the highest packing density; however all of the sphere simulations completed thus far produced some residual "bulk" disorder not obviously resulting from substrate mismatch. In view of the fact that the cases studied here represent only a small subset of all that eventually deserve attention, we end with discussion of the directions in which first extensions of the present simulations might profitably be pursued.Comment: 28 pages, 14 figures; typos fixed; a sentence added to 4th paragraph of sect 5 in responce to a referee's comment

The Organic Beauty Industry: A Gendered Economic Review

Organic beauty has grown to a $6 billion dollar industry supplying consumers with products that align with unique social consumption preferences. This thesis explores the historical economic perspective of the traditional beauty industry and the development of the organic beauty industry. Capitalism influenced the traditional beauty industry during the pursuit for profits that lead to jeopardizing customer and environmental safety. Consumers responded to this behavior by founding an organic beauty industry that not only considered social issues, but negated gendered beauty standards in the process. Organic product efficacy has emerged as an issue that must be dealt with by regulation and legislation on governmental levels. The organic beauty industry, with its limited resources, may not align with traditional capitalism views of endless growth, but the industry could be pivotal in changing the idea of success to incorporate positive social and environmental initiative

State Child Welfare Policy: Causes and Consequences

On any given day almost 400,000 children in the United States are living in an out-of-home care placement due to government intervention. Federal law allows for substantial variance in state child welfare policy on a number of topics. These policy decisions, however, are understudied both in terms of the forces driving them and also the impacts the policies have on actual outcomes for children in care. Utilizing a unique panel data set comprised of thirteen child welfare policies that vary both between states and over time we examine how well redistributive theory (constituent, institutional, paternalistic and resource pressures) explains state policy decisions from 2004-2010. The results provide very little confidence that redistributive pressures are driving state variance, though there are some noteworthy patterns. Within the four categories of explanatory variables, it would seem that child welfare policies are much more sensitive to changes in the social factors associated with a paternalistic response (unmarried birth rate and program utilization) and resource pressures than to constituent or institutional characteristics. Subsequently, a series of hazard models were conducted for each possible discharge outcome, using child level data from the 2010 AFCARS foster care dataset, with primary interest in the influence of policy and state level factors. Policy-level predictors primarily had negative impacts on discharge outcomes for children. Exceptions include better outcomes for children in states with higher generosity of access, increased rates of adoption and aging out with higher ASFA timeline compliance, and more discharges to reunification and adoption with more flexible adoption policy. State level factors consistently showed strong influences on child outcomes. While increased unemployment was associated with worse child outcomes, all other state level factors considered were associated with positive discharge outcomes for children in out-of-home care. This research broadens the theoretical application of redistributive theory to a new policy arena and adds an additional layer of state level explanatory variables to the much-studied outcomes for children in out-of-home care. It establishes that children and families do not exist in a vacuum and that child welfare research must take broader state and policy factors into account for a complete picture

Locked and Unlocked Chains of Planar Shapes

We extend linkage unfolding results from the well-studied case of polygonal linkages to the more general case of linkages of polygons. More precisely, we consider chains of nonoverlapping rigid planar shapes (Jordan regions) that are hinged together sequentially at rotatable joints. Our goal is to characterize the families of planar shapes that admit locked chains, where some configurations cannot be reached by continuous reconfiguration without self-intersection, and which families of planar shapes guarantee universal foldability, where every chain is guaranteed to have a connected configuration space. Previously, only obtuse triangles were known to admit locked shapes, and only line segments were known to guarantee universal foldability. We show that a surprisingly general family of planar shapes, called slender adornments, guarantees universal foldability: roughly, the distance from each edge along the path along the boundary of the slender adornment to each hinge should be monotone. In contrast, we show that isosceles triangles with any desired apex angle less than 90 degrees admit locked chains, which is precisely the threshold beyond which the inward-normal property no longer holds.Comment: 23 pages, 25 figures, Latex; full journal version with all proof details. (Fixed crash-induced bugs in the abstract.

The craft of evaluative practice: Negotiating legitimate methodologies within complex interventions

Evaluations of complex interventions are likely to encounter tensions between different methodological principles, and between the inherent causal rationality of evaluation and the messy complexity of real institutional contexts. Conceptualizing evaluation as producing putatively authoritative evidence, we show how ‘legitimacy’ is a useful concept for unpacking evaluation design in practice. A case study of service integration shows how different approaches may have unpredictable levels of legitimacy, based in contrasting assessments of their methodological acceptability and actual utility. Through showing how practitioners resolved the tensions, we suggest that crafting a patchwork of different methodologies may be legitimate and effective, and can be seen as underpinned by its own pragmatic rationality. However, we also conclude that the explanatory power of theory-driven evaluation can be embedded in such an approach, both in elements of the patchwork and as an overarching guiding principle for the crafting process

Paper Session III-A - History of the First NASA Contract with Russia

As part of the FY92 Budget approval, Congress, in its wisdom, directed NASA to investigate the Russian space hardware and determine its feasibility for use in the U.S. space program. At the invitation of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and the Russian firm NPO Energia, NASA made a reconnaissance visit to NPO Energia to open discussions concerning Russian space hardware. The trip was successful in that NPO Energia opened their facility and proudly displayed their space hardware, launch capabilities, etc. to NASA. NASA left Russia with a heightened understanding of the desperate situation Russian space firms found themselves in with waning support from their own government. The firm was desperate enough it seemed, to peddle their hardware elsewhere if NASA wasn\u27t a viable customer. It was made crystal clear that the firm could only continue, anything approaching their current seale of operation, with an influx of hard currency from outside Russia