Built Environment Reference

A coffee maker that allows boiling water to rise up through a narrow tube and then drip down through a perforated basket filled with ground coffee. While coffee percolators were originally designed to use on a stove, today there are electrical coffee makers that operate on the same principle.

Also known as Penn State. A state-supported four-year higher education institution located in the city of State College, Pennsylvania. The university was first chartered in 1855 as an agricultural high school and then, almost ten years later, as a land-grant college called the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania. It was not until 1953 that the university was renamed Pennsylvania State University. Currently there are many branch campuses of the university in Erie, Harrisburg, Great Valley, and Hershey. The various university campuses offer two and four year undergraduate and upper level graduate degrees.

An array of objects or accessories that are utilized for a particular purpose or a specific activity.

A small, fully enclosed truck, similar to a pickup truck with a shell, except that the "shell" is part of the vehicle's body.

Although the Narcotics Control Division of the Justice Department sounds familiar, it is a fictional agency that functions as a not-so-veiled reference to the U.S. Department of Justice's Drug Enforcement Administration. Hillerman deployed a similar device in his 1971 novel The Fly on the Wall, a political thriller that mixed legitimate and fictional agencies in a blend that evoked contemporary politics and politicians without pointing fingers at real agencies and real people.

A toxic chemical liquid that is a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids. The nitroglycerin formula is highly explosive and is used as an important ingredient in most forms of dynamite, as well as in propellant bombs (rockets and missiles). Nitroglycerin also has a history in the study and practice of medicine, specifically in the management of angina (heart pains) and heart failure.

Also known as Diné College, Navajo Community College is a two-year community college located in Tsaile, Arizona, with branches in various towns across the Navajo Nation, an area of 26,000 square miles stretching over Northwestern New Mexico, northeastern Arizona, and southern Utah. Established in 1968, Navajo Community College was the first postsecondary institution in the U.S. to be under full tribal control. It was housed in Rough Rock, Arizona until 1969 when the Tsaile campus opened. In 1997, a decision was made to change the name to Diné College to better represent the institution's dedication to the preservation of Navajo/Diné history and tradition.

An individual employed by a government agency to police the use of illicit substances. Also known as a narc.

A mortuary, sometimes referred to as a funeral home, is a funeral service agency that specializes in planning and conducting burials, cremations, and memorial services. This includes preparing the body of the deceased for the funeral, helping the family choose a casket or an urn, as well guiding the selection of music and flowers, and arranging transportation to the cemetery.

A formal portrait that usually pairs a frontal and a profile image capture of an individual's head and shoulders. First used in the mid-nineteenth century, mug shots, or face shots, were initially intended to reveal physiognomical characteristics shared by "degenerate" human beings, characteristics that were once believed to identify, measure, and statistically quantify those individuals, or groups, with criminal potential. Of course, many of the characteristics "revealed" by mugshots were actually created by the "scientific" process itself, a solipsistic arrangement called a "closed problem." A closed problem refers to a set of circumstantial evidence where the "solution" determines what the question, or problem, is. For example, if mug shots of criminals tend to show lower class, uneducated, males with short hair and dirty faces, then all lower class uneducated males with short hair and dirty faces must be criminals.

This type of visual profiling, which exists today, was also use to scientifically justify the differentiation between classes, races, ethnicities, and genders. With a middle class white (Caucasian) male serving as the normative example, anyone who deviated from being white, middle class, and male was by default degenerate and more than likely criminal.