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Geotechnical fills are used for building roadway embankments, filling in behind retaining walls, and as backfill above buried pipelines. Lightweight fill reduces the load so structures can be built more economically. A new lightweight geo‐material made from recycled plastic bottles glued together in their original post‐consumer form was developed. The purpose of this work is to explore the use of this new material as a lightweight geotechnical fill.

Through a preliminary laboratory and field study, aspects of the physical and mechanical characteristics of the recycled plastic bottle blocks were investigated. This new material is currently undergoing field trials behind a retaining wall on a bicycle path.

It was found that the average density of this new material is very low, at 32.63 kg/m³ (2.04 lb/ft³), with 59.5 percent of a block made up of recycled plastic bottles. The plastic bottle waste stream obtained from a recycling plant is gap‐graded having approximately 25 percent of the bottle volume at the 2 l bottle size with the remaining 75 percent at the 500 ml bottle size. Unconfined compression tests on small ten‐bottle samples produced strengths of 60 kN/m² (1,250 lb/ft²).

Testing indicates that this material may be useful as a lightweight geotechnical fill over soft soils or behind retaining walls; as an energy‐absorbing crash barrier for highway, race track, or airport safety; as ground and building insulation for Arctic construction; as floating barriers or platforms for offshore work; or for acoustic or vibration dampening for manufacturing processes.

This work explores the use of large volumes of recycled plastic bottles as an environmentally friendly geotechnical engineering material. Engineering parameters for this new material are presented as well as a discussion of an ongoing field study. The information presented here is the first step in understanding this new material with respect to civil engineering applications.

This paper reports the characterization of a photosensitive benzocyclobutene (BCB), a low dielectric constant spin‐on polymer for use as interlayer dielectric in the microelectronics industry. Research work is divided into three main sections. First, BCB thin film characterization was done to investigate the effects of curing conditions on BCB film thickness, dielectric properties, optical properties and extent of cure. Thermal stability of BCB was then evaluated using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) to detect weight loss during thermal curing and degradation. Finally, curing kinetics study was conducted using both differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) dynamic (American Society for Testing and Materials method) and isothermal approaches. The first study shows that determination of vitrification point during thermal curing of BCB is crucial to predict film properties. By curing to just before vitrification, lowest refractive index, hence dielectric constant, could be obtained.

The influence of traditional individually oriented Organization Development (OD), with its focus on psychological dispositions, on self-development and growth, is currently waning. I argue here that individually oriented OD would be well served by a new focus on habitus and social position that expand our understanding of human behavior. Using Bourdieu's concept of social position in the form of “habitus-oriented approach,” as I do here using my consulting experience, allows individually oriented OD to become a scholarly and professional site that understands human behavior in terms of both the social and the personal.

The narrative of The Americans weaves together a spy thriller and a family drama, though it drives home the inseparability of the political and the personal through the lives of the central characters, Philip and Elizabeth, a couple whose marriage is a cover for their work as Soviet spies. This chapter provides a queer reading of their marriage, drawing from the real history of the Cold War politics of sexuality that associated American values with the hetero- and gender normative, white, and middle-class nuclear family. In contrast, the Soviet Union was understood to have disrupted this natural order by installing the state as an overbearing patriarch. Philip and Elizabeth’s fictional cover as a nuclear family requires them to perform American marriage, family, and selfhood. In doing so, they reflect the centrality of the family in America’s Cold War self-image in which the family serves as the anchor of the American order, enabling economic and political self-sufficiency. Their performance of the family challenges our ability to differentiate between real, authentic family that can serve as the legitimate source of social reproduction and between the counterfeit, fake family that disrupts the social order. The queer family, refusing to be placed beyond realm of the political by the moral language of family values, subverts our ability to distinguish between genres since the family drama is already a political thriller.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

THE article which we publish from the pen of Mr. L. Stanley Jast is the first of many which we hope will come from his pen, now that he has release from regular library duties. Anything that Mr. Jast has to say is said with originality even if the subject is not original; his quality has always been to give an independent and novel twist to almost everything he touches. We think our readers will find this to be so when he touches the important question of “The Library and Leisure.”