[Review of] David Greenslade. Welsh Feuer

Greenslade\u27 s rather mod title underlines his main thesis -- namely, that ethnic consciousness among Welsh descendants in North America is very high indeed. Both his own evidence and my own observations convince me that he is perfectly justified in his assertion. The one thing he does not really address is why

[Review of] Richard D. Alba. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America

Believing that a relatively small amount of research has been done with the ethnic identity of white Americans, Alba surveyed 524 whites in the Albany, New York, area. The majority were English, French, German, and Scottish whose forebears had been in this country for several generations. There were also numerous Irish, and among later immigrants, fairly large numbers of Italian and Polish descent

[Review of] Charles C. Moskos. Greek Americans: Struggle and Success

This book should be of primary interest to people at the some thirty colleges and universities which offer courses in Greek American literature and culture. First published in 1980, the major strong point of this book is that the two added chapters and appendix deal with very recent developments on the Greek American scene, particularly the candidacy of Michael Dukakis for president

[Review of] Sid White and S. E. Solberg, eds. Peoples of Washington: Perspectives on Cultural Diversity

This book about the various ethnic people in the state is disappointing in two ways: its format, and its very limited material about some of the groups who have been and are living in the state

[Review of] Elwyn T. Ashton. The Welsh in the United States

Ashton\u27s mid-sized volume about the Welsh in America joins the first, and very short account by David Williams, Wales and America (published in Wales in 1946 as part of a bilingual pamphlet series), and Edward George Hartmann\u27s Americans from Wales (nearly three hundred pages, published in 1967 and reprinted in America in 1978)

UPDATED GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTIONS OF MICHIGAN HERPETOFAUNA:: A SYNTHESIS OF OLD AND NEW SOURCES

Recently a comprehensive overview of reptiles and amphibians in Michigan was published. Unfortunately, the distributions of the species represented were compiled before widespread accessibility to technological tools providing greater access to museum and historical records as well as citizen science efforts. To update the known ranges of Michigan herpetofauna, published literature, museum collections, and photographic vouchers submitted to an online database were examined and 339 new county and island records were added, updating the maps for 48 of Michigan’s 55 known species of reptiles and amphibians. I also present the first published list of Michigan amphibians that includes two new plethodontid salamanders, the Northern Dusky Salamander (Desmognathus fuscus) and Southern Two-lined Salamander (Eurycea cirrigera). This paper serves as an example of the wealth of information available to scientists that may have previously been unobtainable, and can be used for the distribution of herpetofauna elsewhere

[Review of] Ronald D. Dennis. The Call of Zion: The Story of the First Welsh Mormon Emigration

Like so many accounts of immigration, this has both a dark side and a light side. The latter is primarily a story of courage and determination and final success. The former is one of persecution and of propaganda, both pro- and anti-Mormon

Birth of a station: the impact of Nova on the Perth radio market

At the end of 2002 a new player entered the Perth radio market. The launch of Nova threatened to create ripples in the relatively calm waters of the radio pool which had become comfortably settled since the last new entrant twenty years before. Researchers had a chance to observe the impact on the market, the products, the formats and the audiences and this paper describes the highs and lows of the market players during Nova's first year

Universality Conjecture for all Airy, Sine and Bessel Kernels in the Complex Plane

We address the question of how the celebrated universality of local correlations for the real eigenvalues of Hermitian random matrices of size NxN can be extended to complex eigenvalues in the case of random matrices without symmetry. Depending on the location in the spectrum, particular large-N limits (the so-called weakly non-Hermitian limits) lead to one-parameter deformations of the Airy, sine and Bessel kernels into the complex plane. This makes their universality highly suggestive for all symmetry classes. We compare all the known limiting real kernels and their deformations into the complex plane for all three Dyson indices beta=1,2,4, corresponding to real, complex and quaternion real matrix elements. This includes new results for Airy kernels in the complex plane for beta=1,4. For the Gaussian ensembles of elliptic Ginibre and non-Hermitian Wishart matrices we give all kernels for finite N, built from orthogonal and skew-orthogonal polynomials in the complex plane. Finally we comment on how much is known to date regarding the universality of these kernels in the complex plane, and discuss some open problems.Comment: 16 pages, based on invited talk at MSRI Berkeley, September 201