You No Real Man : Constructing Gender, Sexuality, and the Asian American Subject in Jana Monji\u27s Kim

Jana Monji\u27s short story Kim offers a stunning plot twist that challenges readers initial interpretations of the characters as well as many assumptions and stereotypes about Asian American identity, gender, sexuality, and culture. Its pedagogical value for introducing basic literary theory, heterogeneity within gender and sexual identities, and Asian American culture and history is immeasurable. In this essay, I offer an overview of the story, my interpretations of the text, and the pedagogical strategies I use to introduce undergraduate students to concepts that often challenge their world views. Ultimately, this story provides instructors with an accessible and multifaceted text through which to present the basic tenets of gender theory, queer theory, and Asian American culture and history

Listening from a distance: A survey of University of Illinois distance learners and its implications for meaningful instruction.

In Spring 2009, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library conducted a significant new survey of distance learners enrolled in off-campus or online graduate programs. Exploring distance learners’ perceptions about and use of library services, the survey of 146 students reveals opportunities to better meet the research needs of distance learners whose graduate work may demand extensive use of library resources. The survey affords insights into distance learners’ communication preferences, and their particular research needs. Findings from this survey have informed one academic library’s strategy to begin addressing important questions in library instruction for distance learners.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Effects of neutral selection on the evolution of molecular species

We introduce a new model of evolution on a fitness landscape possessing a tunable degree of neutrality. The model allows us to study the general properties of molecular species undergoing neutral evolution. We find that a number of phenomena seen in RNA sequence-structure maps are present also in our general model. Examples are the occurrence of "common" structures which occupy a fraction of the genotype space which tends to unity as the length of the genotype increases, and the formation of percolating neutral networks which cover the genotype space in such a way that a member of such a network can be found within a small radius of any point in the space. We also describe a number of new phenomena which appear to be general properties of neutrally evolving systems. In particular, we show that the maximum fitness attained during the adaptive walk of a population evolving on such a fitness landscape increases with increasing degree of neutrality, and is directly related to the fitness of the most fit percolating network.Comment: 16 pages including 4 postscript figures, typeset in LaTeX2e using the Elsevier macro package elsart.cl

Using the Twentieth Century Reanalysis to assess climate variability for the European wind industry

We characterise the long-term variability of European near-surface wind speeds using 142 years of data from the Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR), and consider the potential of such long-baseline climate data sets for wind energy applications. The low resolution of the 20CR would severely restrict its use on its own for wind farm site-screening. We therefore perform a simple statistical calibration to link it to the higher-resolution ERA-Interim data set (ERAI), such that the adjusted 20CR data has the same wind speed distribution at each location as ERAI during their common period. Using this corrected 20CR data set, wind speeds and variability are characterised in terms of the long-term mean, standard deviation, and corresponding trends. Many regions of interest show extremely weak trends on century timescales, but contain large multidecadal variability. Since reanalyses such as ERAI are often used to provide the background climatology for wind farm site assessments, but contain only a few decades of data, our results can be used as a way of incorporating decadal-scale wind climate variability into such studies, allowing investment risks for wind farms to be reduced.Comment: 18 pages, plus 4 page supplementary information included here as Appendix D. This is the authors' corrected version, matching the content of the version accepted by Theoretical and Applied Climatolog