The movie Kitchen Stories (2003), set in rural Norway in the 1950s, portrays a Swedish researcher sitting on a raised chair in the kitchen of a farmer, observing how the space and appliances are used.1 The observer has a map on which he records all the movements and activities of the homeowner. The final goal of this ethnographic study is to collect enough observations to deduce how kitchens ar...

We live in an increasingly connected and automated society. Smart environments embody this trend by linking computers to everyday tasks and settings. Important features of such environments are that they possess a degree of autonomy, adapt themselves to changing conditions, and communicate with humans in a natural way. These systems can be found in offices, airports, hospitals, classrooms, or a...

There are few data on pesticide exposures of migrant Latino farmworker children, and access to this vulnerable population is often difficult. In this paper we describe a community-based approach to implement culturally appropriate research methods with a migrant Latino farmworker community in Oregon. Assessments were conducted in 96 farmworker homes and 24 grower homes in two agricultural commu...

Nursing homes represent a unique and important methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) reservoir. Not only are strains imported from hospitals and the community, strains can be transported back into these settings from nursing homes. Since MRSA bacteria are prevalent in nursing homes and yet relatively poorly studied in this setting, a multicenter, regional assessment of the frequenc...

International data suggest that for-profit nursing homes tend to provide lower quality than not-for-profit nursing homes. In Germany, the relationships between profit orientation, price and quality of nursing homes have not been investigated. We performed an observational study using secondary data from statutory quality audits of all nursing homes in Germany. The relationships were analyzed bi...

Though it is agreed that the post–bounce, pre–explosion cores of massive stars are unstable to transonic, Rayleigh–Taylor–like instabilities, the role convective motions may play in igniting the supernova explosion itself is not yet clear. Whatever that role, the morphology and nucleosynthetic yields of the explosion, the recoil of the protoneutron star, the spatial distribution of fresh Ni, an...

Nonpremixed jet flames of dimethyl ether (DME) were studied both experimentally and theoretically to investigate flame liftoff near unity Schmidt number. It was found experimentally that although the DME nonpremixed flames have a Schmidt number larger than unity it cannot be lifted directly by increasing the flow rate. Lifted flames can only be established by igniting the mixture in a narrow re...

The development of compact high-intensity lasers, made possible by the technique of chirped pulse amplification, is reviewed. This includes the complexities of high-power laser implementation, such as the generation of short pulses, pulse cleaning, wide-bandwidth amplification, temporal stretching and compression, and the requirements for high-average powers. Details of specific solid-state las...

The central concern of this article is the relationship between ethnography and social theory. With the help of ‘consequent processualism’, a social ontology that centers on the co-constitution of people, cultural forms, social relations, and the built environment, this essay makes an argument for what should be at the core of social theorizing: the principles underpinning the dynamics of proce...