The More She Longs for Home, the Farther Away it Appears: A Paradox of Nostalgia in a Fulani Immigrant Girl’s Life

Nostalgia, which is derived from the Greek words nos (returning home) and algia (pain), refers to longing for the loss of the familiar (Kaplan, 1987). The loss of our connection to the familiar is a painful experience as such loss is connected to a fundamental loss, the loss of ourselves. By losing a connection to familiar people, objects, and places that continue to remain the same from the past to the future, we also lose the continuity within ourselves. And this discontinuity of our past, present, and future selves creates anxiety within us (Milligan, 2003). The painful experience that accompanies the loss of the familiar and the severe longing for the lost was originally viewed as a type of depression, which required psychiatric treatment. However, increasing mobility and changes in modern society have made nostalgia a more typical experience for many. Nostalgia is a relevant experience particularly for immigrants who live away from their homeland

Looking Beyond the Standard Model through Precision Electroweak Physics

The most important hint of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) from the 1995 precision electroweak data is that the most precisely measured quantities, the total, leptonic and hadronic decay widths of the $Z$ and the effective weak mixing angle, $\sin^2\theta_W$, measured at LEP and SLC, and the quark-lepton universality of the weak charged currents measured at low energies, all agree with the predictions of the SM at a few $\times 10^{-3}$ level. By taking into account the above constraints I examine implications of three possible disagreements between experiments and the SM predictions. It is difficult to interpret the 11\% (2.5-$\sigma$) deficit of the $Z$-partial-width ratio $R_c=\Gamma_c/\Gamma_h$, since it either implies an unacceptably large $\alpha_s$ or a subtle cancellation among hadronic $Z$ decay widths in order to keep all the other successful predictions of the SM. The 2\% (3-$\sigma$) excess of the ratio $R_b=\Gamma_b/\Gamma_h$ may indicate the presence of a new rather strong interaction, such as the top-quark Yukawa coupling in the supersymmetric (SUSY) SM or a new interaction responsible for the large top-quark mass in the Technicolor scenario of dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking. Another interpretation may be additional tree-level gauge interactions that couple only to the third generation of fermions. A common consequence of these attempts is a rather small $\alpha_s$, \alpha_s(\mz )_{\msbar}=0.104\pm 0.08. The 0.17\% (1-$\sigma$) deficit ...Comment: Talk presented at Yukawa International Seminar (YKIS)~'95, 23 pages, uuencoded compressed tar file of LaTeX file and 13 EPS files (uses ptptex.sty,wrapfig.sty,psfig.sty,axodraw.sty) PostScript version of complete paper available at ftp://ftp.kek.jp/kek/preprints/TH/TH-463/kekth463.ps.g

On Values of Cyclotomic Polynomials. V

In this paper, we present three results on cyclotomic polynomials. First, we present results about factorization of cyclotomic polynomials over arbitrary fields K. It is well known in cases such that a field K is the rational number field Q or a finite field F q (see [3, 4]). Using irreducibility of cyclotomic polynomials over Q, we can see that there are only finite elements of finite orders in a number field. On the other hand, we should correct some mistakes in [2, Corollary 1]. This mistake have no influence about another results in [2]. Finaly, we state about relations between Fibonacci polynomials and cyclotomic polynomials. This idea is due to K. Kuwano who stated this in his book [1] written in Japanese. 1. Factorizations of cyclotomic polynomials over fields The next theorem shows that irreducible factors of a cyclotomic polynomial Φn(x) over an arbi-trary field have the same degree. Theorem 1. Let K be a field. Then every irreducible factor f(x) of Φn(x) in K[x] has the same degree. More precisely, let L be the minimal splitting field of Φn(x) over a field K of characteristic p ≥ 0. Then we obtain that L is Galois over K, the Galois group G of L over K is a subgroup of the unit group of Z/mZ, where m = n in case p = 0 and n = pem with (m, p) = 1 in case p> 0, and deg f(x) = |G | = [L: K]. Proof. Let f(x) be a monic irreducible factor of Φn(x) in K[x] and let α ∈ L be a root of f(x). Then n = pem by [2, Theorem 1] where m is the order of α in L and m is not divided by p. Thus, we can see from the equation xm − 1 =∏d|m Φd(x) tha

Becoming Co-Witnesses to the Fukushima Disaster in an Elementary Literacy Classroom

This study explores what challenges fifth and sixth graders in Pennsylvania encountered as they exchanged letters with children in Fukushima and read a testimony of the Fukushima disaster written by a child there. Trauma theory and seikatsu tsuzurikata, a Japanese traditional critical literacy approach, were used in designing the project and in interpreting children’s engagement with the project. The children demonstrated signs of emerging empathy for children in Fukushima. However, the unspeakable nature of the trauma experience, students’ discomfort, and a pressure to read and write in a structured manner to prepare for the statewide exam posed obstacles for their development of empathy. Despite the challenges, some children acknowledged the importance of recognizing others’ feelings, including pain, no matter where they live. In order to prepare students as empathetic citizens of human society in an increasingly globalized world, the author urges educators to introduce testimonial readings from across the world in elementary classrooms