[Review of] Milton Murayama. All I Asking For Is My Body

In little over a decade this short novel has become a classic, developing a dedicated following, not only in Asian American communities and literature programs, but also in traditional literature programs alongside books such as Huckleberry Finn where the strategies are the same: the view of the world through the clear eye of youth, the puncturing of both pretense and pretension by the view from the bottom up

[Review of] Carlos Bulosan. America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

First published in 1946, America Is in the Heart has reached a seventh printing (1986). Carlos Bulosan\u27s personal history has evidenced remarkable staying power, and that mainly in the Asian American ethnic communities and the academic programs which describe and support them. This is all the more remarkable in a book that has been damned by Philippine critics for giving a distorted view of the Philippines, and by American critics for distorting the history of the Filipino in America. Despite all this, the popularity, and the sense of rightness that surrounds the book can be explained rather easily once certain limiting presuppositions are removed. America Is in the Heart is an emotionally and esthetically true account of the immigration, spiritual and physical, of the pinoy, the young Filipino with all his village innocence, focused on an America in the heart, which, like the white women in his life, always promised more than it was willing to give. It is the quintessential experience of the pinoy migrant worker in fisheries and fields, up and down the western coast of these United States given rough shape by some of the outward facts of Carlos Bulosan\u27s life. True, the book can be read against the historical record of events noted, the characters can be roughly identified, but it is the literary accomplishment of containing a certain group experience within the narrative limits of a single life that marks the success of the book. There are other sources for the facts of the labor movement in the fields of California or on the slimming lines of the Alaskan canneries. There are few other records that speak as truly to what it meant to be Filipino in temptress America, standing on the sidewalk looking in

Valuing the voluntary sector: rethinking economic analysis

The voluntary sector plays an important role in the sports industry, as a provider of sporting opportunities and in the development of sport, from increasing participation through to supporting excellence and elite performance. However, despite this importance, research on its contribution to sport-related economic activity is limited, with information on this sector remaining the weakest part of current economic assessments of the UK sports industry. The research presented in this article examines the economic importance of the voluntary sector, using a case study of Sheffield. It demonstrates that the sports voluntary sector in the city is considerably smaller than was predicted when using national estimates, and that this is largely a consequence of methodological issues relating to previous research. The article suggests that in the light of the findings and the increasing use of sport in urban policy, there is a need to rethink the methodology used to evaluate the economic contribution of the voluntary sector in the future.</p

Effect of nanoparticle (Pd, Pd/Pt, Ni) deposition on high temperature hydrogenation of Ti-V alloys in gaseous flow containing CO

The hydrogenation properties of Ti-V hydrides coated with nanoparticles have been studied in gaseous mixtures of argon and hydrogen with and without additions of 1% CO. Nanoparticles of Pd, Ni, and co-deposited Pd/Pt with particle sizes of ~30-60 nm were formed by electroless deposition on the hydride surfaces. The alloy resistance to CO could be significantly improved by particle deposition. Large amounts of hydrogen were absorbed in a CO-containing gas when Ni and Pd/Pt deposition had been applied, while pure Pd deposition had no positive effect. Ni was found to have a stronger effect than those of Pd/Pt and Pd, possibly because of the size effect of Ni nanoparticles.IS

Comparison of transabdominal ultrasound and electromagnetic transponders for prostate localization.

The aim of this study is to compare two methodologies of prostate localization in a large cohort of patients. Daily prostate localization using B-mode ultrasound has been performed at the Nebraska Medical Center since 2000. More recently, a technology using electromagnetic transponders implanted within the prostate was introduced into our clinic (Calypso(R)). With each technology, patients were localized initially using skin marks. Localization error distributions were determined from offsets between the initial setup positions and those determined by ultrasound or Calypso. Ultrasound localization data was summarized from 16619 imaging sessions spanning 7 years; Calypso localization data consists of 1524 fractions in 41 prostate patients treated in the course of a clinical trial at five institutions and 640 localizations from the first 16 patients treated with our clinical system. Ultrasound and Calypso patients treated between March and September 2007 at the Nebraska Medical Center were analyzed and compared, allowing a single institutional comparison of the two technologies. In this group of patients, the isocenter determined by ultrasound-based localization is on average 5.3 mm posterior to that determined by Calypso, while the systematic and random errors and PTV margins calculated from the ultrasound localizations were 3 - 4 times smaller than those calculated from the Calypso localizations. Our study finds that there are systematic differences between Calypso and ultrasound for prostate localization

Silicon-based three-dimensional microstructures for radiation dosimetry in hadrontherapy

In this work, we propose a solid-state-detector for use in radiation microdosimetry. This device improves the performance of existing dosimeters using customized 3D-cylindrical microstructures etched inside silicon. The microdosimeter consists of an array of micro-sensors that have 3D-cylindrical electrodes of 15 μm diameter and a depth of 5 μm within a silicon membrane, resulting in a well-defined micrometric radiation sensitive volume. These microdetectors have been characterized using an 241Am source to assess their performance as radiation detectors in a high-LET environment. This letter demonstrates the capability of this microdetector to be used to measure dose and LET in hadrontherapy centers for treatment plan verification as part of their patient-specific quality control program

Assessment of parameters describing representativeness of air quality in-situ measurement sites

The atmospheric layer closest to the ground is strongly influenced by variable surface fluxes (emissions, surface deposition) and can therefore be very heterogeneous. In order to perform air quality measurements that are representative of a larger domain or a certain degree of pollution, observatories are placed away from population centres or within areas of specific population density. Sites are often categorised based on subjective criteria that are not uniformly applied by the atmospheric community within different administrative domains yielding an inconsistent global air quality picture. A novel approach for the assessment of parameters reflecting site representativeness is presented here, taking emissions, deposition and transport towards 34 sites covering Western and Central Europe into account. These parameters are directly inter-comparable among the sites and can be used to select sites that are, on average, more or less suitable for data assimilation and comparison with satellite and model data. Advection towards these sites was simulated by backward Lagrangian Particle Dispersion Modelling (LPDM) to determine the sites' average catchment areas for the year 2005 and advection times of 12, 24 and 48 h. Only variations caused by emissions and transport during these periods were considered assuming that these dominate the short-term variability of most but especially short lived trace gases. The derived parameters describing representativeness were compared between sites and a novel, uniform and observation-independent categorisation of the sites based on a clustering approach was established. Six groups of European background sites were identified ranging from &lt;i&gt;generally remote&lt;/i&gt; to more polluted &lt;i&gt;agglomeration&lt;/i&gt; sites. These six categories explained 50 to 80% of the inter-site variability of median mixing ratios and their standard deviation for NO&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; and O&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;, while differences between group means of the longer-lived trace gas CO were insignificant. The derived annual catchment areas strongly depended on the applied LPDM and input wind fields, the catchment settings and the year of analysis. Nevertheless, the parameters describing representativeness showed considerably less variability than the catchment geometry, supporting the applicability of the derived station categorisation