No Certain Way to Tell Japanese From Chinese : Racist Statements and the Marking of Difference

After the 1941 Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, a series of articles appeared simultaneously in American magazines. A 22 December 1941 article in Time gives advice to its Caucasian readers on How To Tell Your Friends From the Japs, as does an article in Life magazine entitled How To Tell Japs From the Chinese. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, the racism of these texts seems obvious. At the time of their appearance, how did this racism remain unmarked? This paper has two purposes: the first, examining the way racist statements about people of Japanese descent become established, as well as the way those statements become connected to pre-existing racist statements about people of Chinese descent; the second, examining how articles and photographs in magazines such as Time and Life negotiate this pre-existing network of statements

The significance of distance constraints in peasant farming systems with special reference to sub-Saharan Africa

Analysis of agricultural development potential at village level tends to neglect the factor of relative location, compared with the attention paid to physical resources and economic factors. This paper argues that, in African peasant agriculture, distance takes on increasing significance when farming populations are resettled and agglomerated, there being little intensification in evidence. The impacts of agglomeration and excessive ‘journeys to work’ are identified as affecting the quantity and the quality of agricultural labour inputs, the collection of domestic necessities (especially fuelwood), livestock husbandry, and socio-cultural and welfare conditions.\ud \ud Some simple analyses of time-distance relations, such as the ‘effective working day’, are also described, and a model of peasant decision-making with respect to optimizing farm activity location is proposed as a descriptive-explanatory tool. Response to distance problems is considered as part of rural change; and the particular position of peasant women vis-à-vis distance and transport technology is stressed. Data collection methods and descriptive statements of the spatial relationships within a village, or an agro-ecological zone, are outlined within the framework of rapid rural appraisal. Finally, a number of potential solutions to the agro-economic distance problem are briefly discussed—either as changes in farming systems, or as redistributions of the working population. Changes with the greatest potential are intensification and satellite settlements, though both face difficulties in policy and in implementation

Algorithms For Extracting Timeliness Graphs

We consider asynchronous message-passing systems in which some links are timely and processes may crash. Each run defines a timeliness graph among correct processes: (p; q) is an edge of the timeliness graph if the link from p to q is timely (that is, there is bound on communication delays from p to q). The main goal of this paper is to approximate this timeliness graph by graphs having some properties (such as being trees, rings, ...). Given a family S of graphs, for runs such that the timeliness graph contains at least one graph in S then using an extraction algorithm, each correct process has to converge to the same graph in S that is, in a precise sense, an approximation of the timeliness graph of the run. For example, if the timeliness graph contains a ring, then using an extraction algorithm, all correct processes eventually converge to the same ring and in this ring all nodes will be correct processes and all links will be timely. We first present a general extraction algorithm and then a more specific extraction algorithm that is communication efficient (i.e., eventually all the messages of the extraction algorithm use only links of the extracted graph)

Magnetohydrodynamic code for gravitationally-stratified media

Aims. We describe a newly-developed magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code with the capacity to simulate the interaction of any arbitrary perturbation (i.e., not necessarily limited to the linearised limit) with a magnetohydrostatic equilibrium background. Methods. By rearranging the terms in the system of MHD equations and explicitly taking into account the magnetohydrostatic equilibrium condition, we define the equations governing the perturbations that describe the deviations from the background state of plasma for the density, internal energy and magnetic field. We found it was advantageous to use this modified form of the MHD equations for numerical simulations of physical processes taking place in a stable gravitationally-stratified plasma. The governing equations are implemented in a novel way in the code. Sub-grid diffusion and resistivity are applied to ensure numerical stability of the computed solution of the MHD equations. We apply a fourth-order central difference scheme to calculate the spatial derivatives, and implement an arbitrary Runge-Kutta scheme to advance the solution in time. Results. We have built the proposed method, suitable for strongly-stratified magnetised plasma, on the base of the well-documented Versatile Advection Code (VAC) and performed a number of one- and multi-dimensional hydrodynamic and MHD tests to demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of the code for applications to astrophysical plasmas

Using finite element method in preoperative planning for wrist surgery

The wrist has a wide variation of 'normal' anatomy, which may explain the discrepancy seen in success rates of some clinical procedures between patients with similar symptoms. Previously published finite element models of the wrist joint have been based on a single geometry and/or single loading condition which does not give a full representation of the spectrum of normal wrists. In this study, three finite element models of the wrist were created and used subject specific boundary conditions thus building a set of models which can be identified as a part of a larger population. Systematic variations in anatomy and bone position were studied and the effect they have on the general load transfer through the normal wrist joint. That information can prove to be important for future surgical planning on the wrist joint

Partial quantification of pigments extracted from the zooxanthellate octocoral Sinularia flexibilis at varying irradiances

Chlorophyll-a (chl-a) and carotenoid pigments of the zooxanthellate octocoral Sinularia flexibilis were analyzed using high performance liquid chromatography following exposure to three light intensities for over 30 days. From the coral fragments located at different light intensities, a total carotenoid of >41 µg g-1 dry weight, including peridinin, xanthophylls (likely diadinoxanthin + diatoxanthin), and chl-a as the most abundant pigments, with minor contents of astaxantin and ß-carotene were detected. The whole content of chl-a weighed 5 µg g-1 dry weight in all coral colonies. Chl-a and carotenoids contributed 11.2% and 88.2%, respectively, to all pigments detected, and together accounted for 99.4% of the total pigments present. The highest contents of carotenoids and chl-a was observed in the coral grafts placed in an irradiance of 100 µmol quanta m-2 s-1; they showed lower ratios of total carotenoids: chl-a compared to those exposed to 400 µmol quanta m-2 s-1 after >30 days of incubation. The ratios of peridinin and xanthophylls with respect to chl-a from the colonies at 400 µmol quanta m-2 s-1 were approximately double those observed at irradiances of 100 and 200 µmol quanta m-2 s-1. Partial quantification of pigments in this study showed that the carotenoids of S. flexibilis showed a decrease at irradiances above 100 µmol quanta m-2 s-1, with the exception of an increase in ß-carotene at 200 µmol quanta m-2 s-1

Single-chip inverter for active filters

Generally inverter-based active filters, which employ pulse-width-modulated (PWM) techniques, use microprocessors for overall control and discrete logic for the generation of switching patterns. Because of the complexity of control required, discrete logic circuits tend to have a very high component count, making system design inflexible, expensive and less reliable than integrated circuit implementation. The work reported here presents a novel design of a single-chip controlled PWM inverter-based active filter, which addresses these issues

On the Mailbox Problem

The Mailbox Problem was described and solved by Aguilera, Gafni, and Lamport in their 2010 DC paper with an algorithm that uses two flag registers that carry 14 values each. An interesting problem that they ask is whether there is a mailbox algorithm with smaller flag values. We give a positive answer by describing a mailbox algorithm with 6 and 4 values in the two flag registers

Future harvest : the fine line between myopia and utopia

Inaugural lecture upon taking up the post fo Personal Professor of Plant Production Systems at Wageningen University on 12 May 2011