Age and Ethnic Variations in Attitudes Towards Older Persons, Family and Filial Obligations

Two major interpretations have been advanced to explain the frequent finding that ethnic elders have more extensive kin support networks than Anglo elders. Structural interpretations argue that the exigencies of poverty and ill health cause minorities to rely more heavily on family members for help than Anglos, whereas cultural explanations rest upon presumed differences in family values and attitudes. Despite the prominence of these two explanations, direct tests of the cultural model are rare. In this study, we use data from a study of 100 African, Mexican, Vietnamese, European, and Native American adults to test the hypothesis that there are ethnic group differences in familism, filial responsibility norms, and attitudes toward the elderly. The role of age and socioeconomic status in explaining racial/ethnic variation in these values is also explored. Results suggest that there are important cultural differences among groups, that these differences are not a function of group differences in SES or age, and that the differences are not consistent with the common depiction of traditional ethnic familism

Regularity of solutions to a fractional elliptic problem with mixed Dirichlet-Neumann boundary data

In this work we study regularity properties of solutions to fractional elliptic problems with mixed Dirichlet-Neumann boundary data when dealing with the Spectral Fractional Laplacian

Semiconductor cavity QED: Bandgap induced by vacuum fluctuations

We consider theoretically a semiconductor nanostructure embedded in one-dimensional microcavity and study the modification of its electron energy spectrum by the vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. To solve the problem, a non-perturbative diagrammatic approach based on the Green's function formalism is developed. It is shown that the interaction of the system with the vacuum fluctuations of the optical cavity opens gaps within the valence band of the semiconductor. The approach is verified for the case of large photon occupation numbers, proving the validity of the model by comparing to previous studies of the semiconductor system excited by a classical electromagnetic field. The developed theory is of general character and allows for unification of quantum and classical descriptions of the strong light-matter interaction in semiconductor structures