Family, Unvalued: Discrimination, Denial, and the Fate of Binational Same-Sex Couples under U.S. Law

"Family, Unvalued" documents the crippling barriers same-sex binational couples face in pursuing a goal enshrined in America's founding document -- happiness. One fact sets them apart from other binational families. A heterosexual couple where one partner is foreign, one a U.S. citizen, can claim the right to enter the U.S. with a few strokes of a pen. But a lesbian or gay couple's relationship -- even if they have lived together for decades, even if their commitment is incontrovertible--is irrelevant. Instead they face a long limbo of legal indifference, harassment, and fear. Delays, bureaucracy, inconsistency, and injustice make the U.S. immigration system a nightmare for millions. Debate over that system is intensifying. Family, Unvalued shows how its failures affect, and sometimes destroy, families which prejudice has deprived of any legal protection. This report reveals how today's discrimination grows from a long history of anti-immigrant campaigns. Most of all, Family, Unvalued lets the reader hear the sometimes horrifying, always enlightening testimony of lesbian and gay families: people simply seeking to build a better future ... together

External luminescence and photon recycling in near-field thermophotovoltaics

The importance of considering near-field effects on photon recycling and spontaneous emission in a thermophotovoltaic device is investigated. Fluctuational electrodynamics is used to calculate external luminescence from a photovoltaic cell as a function of emitter type, vacuum gap thickness between emitter and cell, and cell thickness. The observed changes in external luminescence suggest strong modifications of photon recycling caused by the presence of the emitter. Photon recycling for propagating modes is affected by reflection at the vacuum-emitter interface and is substantially decreased by the leakage towards the emitter through tunneling of frustrated modes. In addition, spontaneous emission by the cell can be strongly enhanced by the presence of an emitter supporting surface polariton modes. It follows that using a radiative recombination model with a spatially uniform radiative lifetime, even corrected by a photon recycling factor, is inappropriate. Applying the principles of detailed balance, and accounting for non-radiative recombination mechanisms, the impact of external luminescence enhancement in the near field on thermophotovoltaic performance is investigated. It is shown that unlike isolated cells, the external luminescence efficiency is not solely dependent on cell quality, but significantly increases as the vacuum gap thickness decreases below 400 nm for the case of an intrinsic silicon emitter. In turn, the open-circuit voltage and power density benefit from this enhanced external luminescence toward the emitter. This benefit is larger as cell quality, characterized by the contribution of non-radiative recombination, decreases.Comment: 44 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, 4 supplemental figure

Pour une sémiotique des traces

Historien et romancier: deux artisans des lieux fictionnels. La sémiotique comme fondement des théories de la réalité de l'histoire. Le réel comme signe d'une double modélisation : scientifique et littéraire. Recours à la logique abductive pour l'élaboration d'une sémiotique des traces. Roman historique et discours de l'histoire: deux arts de production et de transformation des signes.Historians and novelists: craftsmen building fictitious worlds. Semiotics as the foundations of theories dealing with reality in history. Reality, a sign of dual modelization: scientific and literary.The logic of abduction: its role in the development of a semiotic of cultural traces. The writing of history and the writing of historical fiction: two cultural modes of producing and transforming signs