China’s WAPI Policy: Security Measure or Trade Protectionism?

In December of 2003, the Chinese government announced that all WLAN equipment sold in China must conform to a propriety standard called WAPI, rather than the internationally accepted Wi-Fi standard. Moreover, for foreign firms to gain access to WAPI technology, they would need to partner with one of two-dozen Chinese firms designated by the Chinese government. The policy ostensibly grew out of security concerns regarding Wi-Fi, although it is unclear whether WAPI is more secure. Beijing has now indefinitely postponed the implementation of this policy, but WAPI is still relevant. This iBrief argues that WAPI is illustrative of many Chinese technical barriers to trade in the high-tech sector, and evaluates this policy\u27s consistency with China\u27s WTO obligations

Holding On To History

When I searched for the story of Georges Lieber, the very man whose drive to resist inspired the concept for this essay, I could not find it. The only trace of him was his record on the Yad Vashem database which merely states that he was a student and that he was transported from Lyon, France to Auschwitz in 1944. His story, along with much of Holocaust history, remains unknown or misunderstood for many people, both from my generation and those before us. As a long-term student of history and an aspiring educator, I have chosen to resist the sliding grip that people have on history and hoist it up before the lives and lessons in it are lost

China’s WAPI Policy: Security Measure or Trade Protectionism?

In December of 2003, the Chinese government announced that all WLAN equipment sold in China must conform to a propriety standard called WAPI, rather than the internationally accepted Wi-Fi standard. Moreover, for foreign firms to gain access to WAPI technology, they would need to partner with one of two-dozen Chinese firms designated by the Chinese government. The policy ostensibly grew out of security concerns regarding Wi-Fi, although it is unclear whether WAPI is more secure. Beijing has now indefinitely postponed the implementation of this policy, but WAPI is still relevant. This iBrief argues that WAPI is illustrative of many Chinese technical barriers to trade in the high-tech sector, and evaluates this policy\u27s consistency with China\u27s WTO obligations

‘Our Family Picture is a Little Hint of Heaven’: Race, Religion and Selective Reproduction in US ‘Embryo Adoption’

People use selective reproductive technologies (SRT) in various family-making practices to assist with decisions about which children should be born. The practice of ‘embryo adoption’, a form of embryo donation developed by white American evangelical Christians in the late 1990s, is a novel site for reconceptualizing SRT and examining how they function among users. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2018 on US ‘embryo adoption’, this study provides an anthropological analysis of media produced by and about one white evangelical couple\u27s race-specific preferences for embryos from donors of colour. This article shows how racializing processes and religious beliefs function as mutually reinforcing SRT for some ‘embryo adoption’ participants. Evangelical convictions justify racialized preferences, and racializing processes within and beyond the church reinforce religious acts. Race-specific preferences for embryos among white evangelicals promote selective decision-making not for particular kinds of children, a current focus in studies of SRT, but for particular kinds of families. This study expands the framework of SRT to include selection for wanted family forms and technologies beyond biomedical techniques, such as social technologies like racial constructs and religious convictions. Broadly, this article encourages greater attention to religion within analyses about race and reproduction by revealing how they are deeply entwined with Christianity, especially in the USA. Wherever constructions of race and religious convictions co-exist with selective reproductive decision-making, scholars should consider race, reproduction and religion as inextricable, rather than distinct, domains of analysis

National Liberation Narratives

An analysis of the propaganda of the Freedom Fighters for Israel, one of the three movements that took up arms against the British mandate in Palestine, provides the basis for the development of a model of national liberation narratives. It indicates that they are best understood as a morality play between the forces of good and evil in which the freedom fighters will overcome seemingly insurmountable odds and ultimately emerge victorious. This configuration is repeat ed in a series of nested narratives — contemporary, historical and metahistorical, national, and universal, individual and collective — that reinforce each other and the message they are trying to convey. At the same time, however, these stories are in dialogue with three rival ones — the foreign narrative of the occupying power, the dom inant narrative of less militant nationalists, and the prior narrative of the religious authorities. To a large extent, these opposing tales provide the inferential structure for the stories of the liberation movement. In the war of words, it is not the freedom fighters but their rivals that set the contours of the conflict

Cherisa Cromer in a Senior Soprano Recital

This is the program for the senior soprano recital of Cherisa Cromer. Ms. Cromer was accompanied by Glenda Aldridge on the piano. This recital took place on February 18, 2002, in the McBeth Recital Hall in the Mabee Fine Arts Center

Molly: The Not So Convincing Truth of MDMA

This article discusses the schedule classification and effects of MDMA. The potential damage, therapeutic effects and reclassification of MDMA are examined in a new perspective that challenges past notions which lead to it\u27s scheduling as a class one drug

Free Field Realisations in Logarithmic Conformal Field Theory

Invariances of conformal field theories (CFTs) would seem to suggest that correlation functions behave as power laws. However, logarithms also exhibit conformal invariance. When logarithms are permitted in two-dimensional CFTs, the corresponding state spaces characteristically involve reducible but indecomposable Virasoro modules with non-diagonalisable algebra action. Notably, such state spaces no longer naturally admit a grading into energy eigenspaces. Despite this non-diagonalisable energy operator, one finds significant physical motivation for the study of such representations, with many interesting statistical mechanical models exhibiting this behaviour: percolation, dilute polymers, self-avoiding walks, and more. A vast amount of effort has been made in the study of these two-dimensional logarithmic CFTs, both their internal structure and their fusion rules. However, it would be fair to say that logarithmic CFTs are still less well understood than their non-logarithmic counterparts. In recent years, the relevance of free-field oscillator algebras to the study of such representations has become more and more apparent. Many of the module structures in question might more appropriately be considered as Fock-type spaces. In this thesis we develop free field realisations of logarithmic CFTs. We analyse some general features, examining staggered modules of the Virasoro algebra in particular, before providing a construction for staggered modules consisting of Fock spaces considered as Virasoro modules. We derive an explicit formula for a module invariant of staggered Fock modules, verifying that the given construction agrees with those seen to date in the literature. We then turn to more conjectural areas, examining how the non-diagonalisaiblity of the Virasoro representation can be reproduced by the inclusion of additional modes into the underlying oscillator algebras, and how the states created by these modes correspond to the vacuum evaluations of logarithmic fields. We take these as our motivating examples for a subsequent working definition of logarithmic vertex operator algebras, in the hope that not only do their state spaces correspond to the staggered structures developed to this point, but that they provide an additional avenue of approach in the construction and study of logarithmic conformal field theories

Program Notes - Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Franz Schubert (1797-1828

A Comparative Analysis of the Nutrient Composition and Digestibility of California Perennial and Annual Grasses at Four Stages of Growth

Beef products represent the fourth largest agricultural commodity in the state of California, valuing more than $3 billion from 2013 to 2015 (CDFA, 2016) and procure 90% of the income for the range livestock industry (FRAP, 2003). Forages found on California’s coastal, desert, foothill, and mountain ranges are the basis of the state’s beef cattle industry. Understanding their nutritional quality of these forages is important for their effective use (George et al., 2001a; Waterman et al., 2014). The objectives of this research were to investigate the nutritional characteristics, and in situ digestbilities in Angus beef cattle, of common California annual and perennial grasses: wild oats (Avena barbata and Avena fatua), soft chess (Bromus hordeaceous), filaree (Erodium botrys), Italian ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum), blue wildrye (Elymus glaucus), creeping wildrye (Leymus tritichoides), melic (Melica californica, Melica imperfecta, Melica torreyana), foothill needlegrass (Nasella lepida), purple needlegrass (Nasella pulchra). Nutritional composition as a percentage of dry matter (crude protein, CP; neutral detergent fiber, NDF; acid detergent fiber, ADF; and acid detergent lignin, ADL) and digestibilities were compared at four growth stages: late vegetative (LV), early reproductive (ER), late reproductive (LR), and dry (D). Plant samples were collected in San Luis Obispo County, CA. Crude protein concentrations decreased, and fiber concentrations increased, with maturity (P ≤ 0.05). Perennial grasses contained more NDF and ADF than annual grasses, across all growth stages (P ≤ 0.05). Annual grasses were significantly higher than perennials in dry matter digestibility (%DMD) at the 48 h incubation, when averaged across all growth stages (P ≤ 0.05); and at the LR and D stages, when averaged across all incubation periods (P ≤ 0.05). Within the annual grasses, %DMD was similar between ER, LR, and D stages. Within the perennial grasses, %DMD was similar between the LR and D stages (P ≤ 0.05)