Using EGA-GC to Analyze Nicotine N-oxide in Order to Explain Low Nicotine Concentrations in E-cigarette Liquids

Evolved-gas analysis coupled with gas chromatography (EGA-GC) was used to analyze e-cigarette liquids. Previous analyses of e-cigarette liquids have shown that the determined concentration of nicotine is lower than the advertised concentration. A possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the nicotine in the liquids is being oxidized to nicotine N-oxide by exposure to air and thus reducing the concentration of nicotine. This study focused on analyzing samples of thermally-rearranged nicotine N-oxide. Using EGA-GC, a calibration curve was generated for nicotine N-oxide concentration, which could potentially be used to explain reduced nicotine concentrations in e-cigarette liquids

Pleasure

The history of the political thought on pleasure is not a cloistered affair in which scholars only engage one another. In political thought, one commonly finds a critical engagement with the wider public and the ruling classes, which are both perceived to be dangerously hedonistic. The effort of many political thinkers is directed towards showing that other political ends are more worthy than pleasure: Plato battles vigorously against Calicles' pleasure seeking in the Gorgias, Augustine argues in The City of God against the human tendency to hedonism in favor of a profound distrust of pleasure, and even Machiavelli claims in The Prince that it is in the prince's best interest to separate his pursuit of pleasure from his pursuit of political power. The thrust of the majority of political thought is to interrupt the popular equation that links pleasure with the good. Instead, political thought has largely followed Plato's lead and has worked to contain hedonism on two fronts. First, pleasure is rigorously separated from ethical and political good: what is good is not identical with what is pleasurable even if the two sometimes overlap. Second, even where the pursuit of pleasure is judged to be coincident with the good, pleasure should only be pursued to the degree it is rational to do so and pursued in the most rational way. Of course, it is not true that all thinkers hold to these two positions on pleasure. Epicureanism and utilitarianism are two major schools of thought that challenge the first precept equating pleasure with the good. Both Epicureanism and utilitarianism argue that the only good is pleasure. However, it is much less frequently that one finds a thinker challenging the second Platonic position that reason must master and guide our pursuit of pleasure—even the Epicureans and utilitarians believe that pleasure is best pursued rationally. However, Foucault has attracted recent attention by challenging the idea that reason should dominate the pursuit of pleasure

Is the Affordable Care Act\u27s Individual Mandate a Certified Job-Killer?

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act argue that its individual mandate component is a certified job-killer. In this paper, I develop a Real Business Cycle model with a search-based labor market to test the validity of these concerns. I integrate the individual mandate into the model and conduct a general equilibrium analysis of its effects. The simulated results show that the imposition of the individual mandate regime should result in higher levels of aggregate employment and output

Education Unleashed: Participatory Culture, Education, and Innovation in Second Life

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and LearningWhile virtual worlds share common technologies and audiences with games, they possess many unique characteristics. Particularly when compared to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual worlds create very different learning and teaching opportunities through markets, creation, and connections to the real world, and lack of overt game goals. This chapter aims to expose a wide audience to the breadth and depth of learning occurring within Second Life (SL). From in-world classes in the scripting language to mixed-reality conferences about the future of broadcasting, a tremendous variety of both amateurs and experts are leveraging SL as a platform for education. In one sense, this isn't new since every technology is co-opted by communities for communication, but SL is different because every aspect of it was designed to encourage this co-opting, this remixing of the virtual and the real

Resource efficient redundancy using quorum-based cycle routing in optical networks

In this paper we propose a cycle redundancy technique that provides optical networks almost fault-tolerant point-to-point and multipoint-to-multipoint communications. The technique more importantly is shown to approximately halve the necessary light-trail resources in the network while maintaining the fault-tolerance and dependability expected from cycle-based routing. For efficiency and distributed control, it is common in distributed systems and algorithms to group nodes into intersecting sets referred to as quorum sets. Optimal communication quorum sets forming optical cycles based on light-trails have been shown to flexibly and efficiently route both point-to-point and multipoint-to-multipoint traffic requests. Commonly cycle routing techniques will use pairs of cycles to achieve both routing and fault-tolerance, which uses substantial resources and creates the potential for underutilization. Instead, we intentionally utilize redundancy within the quorum cycles for fault-tolerance such that almost every point-to-point communication occurs in more than one cycle. The result is a set of cycles with 96.60% - 99.37% fault coverage, while using 42.9% - 47.18% fewer resources.Comment: 17th International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks (ICTON), 5-9 July 2015. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1608.05172, arXiv:1608.0516

How Propaganda Became Public Relations: Foucault and the Corporate Government of the Public

How Propaganda Became Public Relations pulls back the curtain on propaganda: how it was born, how it works, and how it has masked the bulk of its operations by rebranding itself as public relations. Cory Wimberly uses archival materials and wide variety of sources — Foucault’s work on governmentality, political economy, liberalism, mass psychology, and history — to mount a genealogical challenge to two commonplaces about propaganda. First, modern propaganda did not originate in the state and was never primarily located in the state; instead, it began and flourished as a for-profit service for businesses. Further, propaganda is not focused on public beliefs and does not operate mainly through lies and deceit; propaganda is an apparatus of government that aims to create the publics that will freely undertake the conduct its clients’ desire. Businesses have used propaganda since the early twentieth century to construct the laboring, consuming, and voting publics that they needed to secure and grow their operations. Over that time, corporations have become the most numerous and well-funded apparatuses of government in the West, operating privately and without democratic accountability. Wimberly explains why liberal strategies of resistance have failed and a new focus on creating mass subjectivity through democratic means is essential to countering propaganda. This book offers a sophisticated analysis that will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, Continental philosophy, political communication, the history of capitalism, and the history of public relations

Ole’ Zip Coon is a Mighty Learned Scholar: Blackface Minstrelsy as Reflection and Foundation of American Popular Culture

The blackface minstrel show is often disregarded in both popular and professional discourse when American popular culture is being examined. Often dismissed as a unilateral, purely racist spectacle, this paper argues for a more nuanced understanding of blackface minstrelsy and its formative role in the creation of a trans-regional American culture. Through an exploration of the ways in which ethnic minorities, women, language, and histrionics were presented on the blackface minstrel stage, an understanding of the ways in which popular entertainments both reflect and create popular sentiment can be formed. As the dominant American cultural output of the 19th century, an understanding of blackface minstrelsy is integral to an understanding of the fluid and varied mores of racism, male privilege, and white privilege which linger in varying degrees to this day. This piece is intended to serve as an introduction to the ways in which 19th century Americans and their modern counterparts used and use blackface tropes to both reinforce and question the place of social hierarchies in a country founded on the premise that “all men are created equal”