[Review of] Usha Welaratna. Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America

Although approximately 150,000 Cambodians now reside in the United States, very little information has been published on this group. When available at all, descriptive and statistical data about Cambodians is generally lumped together with that of Laotians and Vietnamese in the category “Southeast Asian Refugees.” This is a grave shortcoming: first, because the Cambodians’ culture is quite different from that of other Southeast Asians -- making aggregate accounts of their experience inaccurate; and second, and perhaps even more important, is the fact that the Cambodian people have experienced one of the most horrible holocausts in modern history, making their ordeal one which should be well-documented such that humanity might prevent its repetition. However, with the publication of Beyond the Killing Fields, a valuable new source of information about Cambodians in the United States has become available

[Review of] Luciano Mangiafico. Contemporary American Immigrants: Patterns of Filipino, Korean and Chinese Settlement in the United States

Since the passage of the immigration acts of 1965, a large number of skilled Asians have migrated to the United States. Scholars have noticed this trend, labelling these, along with other skilled third world sojourners, the new immigration

Wandering Jews: Global Jewish Migration

Despite the importance of historical and contemporary migration to the American Jewish community, popular awareness of the diversity and complexity of the American Jewish migration legacy is limited and largely focused upon Yiddish-speaking Jews who left the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 to settle in eastern and midwestern cities. Wandering Jews provides readers with a broader understanding of the Jewish experience of migration in the United States and elsewhere. It describes the record of a wide variety of Jewish migrant groups, including those encountering different locations of settlement, historical periods, and facets of the migration experience. While migrants who left the Pale of Settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are discussed, the volume’s authors also explore less well-studied topics. These include the fate of contemporary Jewish academics who seek to build communities in midwestern and western college towns; the adaptation experience of recent Jewish migrants from Latin America, Israel, and the former Soviet Union; the adjustment of Iranian Jews; the experience of contemporary Jewish migrants in France and Belgium; the return of Israelis living abroad; and a number of other topics. Interdisciplinary, the volume draws upon history, sociology, geography, and other fields. Written in a lively and accessible style,Wandering Jews will appeal to a wide range of readers, including students and scholars in Jewish studies, international migration, history, ethnic studies, and religious studies, as well as general-interest readers.https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_previews/1067/thumbnail.jp

[Review of] Cheryl Lynn Greenberg. Or Does it Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression

Or Does it Explode? is a meticulously researched study of the social, economic, and political status of Harlem from the 1920s to the 1940s, with a major emphasis on the Depression years

[Review of] Mohammed E. Ahrari, ed. Ethnic Groups and U.S. Foreign Policy

In recent years, the efforts of various ethnic populations to influence American policy on behalf of foreign nations or groups have become an increasingly visible element in American political life. This development is the subject of Ahrari\u27s book

Wandering Jews: Global Jewish Migration

Despite the importance of historical and contemporary migration to the American Jewish community, popular awareness of the diversity and complexity of the American Jewish migration legacy is limited and largely focused upon Yiddish-speaking Jews who left the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 to settle in eastern and midwestern cities. Wandering Jews provides readers with a broader understanding of the Jewish experience of migration in the United States and elsewhere. It describes the record of a wide variety of Jewish migrant groups, including those encountering different locations of settlement, historical periods, and facets of the migration experience. While migrants who left the Pale of Settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are discussed, the volume’s authors also explore less well-studied topics. These include the fate of contemporary Jewish academics who seek to build communities in midwestern college towns; the adaptation experience of recent Jewish migrants from Latin America, Israel, and the former Soviet Union; the adjustment of Iranian Jews; the experience of contemporary Jewish migrants in France and Belgium; the return of Israelis living abroad; and a number of other topics. Interdisciplinary, the volume draws upon history, sociology, geography, and other fields. Written in a lively and accessible style, Wandering Jews will appeal to a wide range of readers, including students and scholars in Jewish studies, international migration, history, ethnic studies, and religious studies, as well as general-interest readers.https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/casden/1010/thumbnail.jp

[Review of] Troy Duster. Backdoor to Eugenics

During the first decades of this century, the theory of eugenics, which applied social Darwinism to human beings, was an influential movement. Its major contention was that Northern Europeans were genetically superior to other groups-Southern and Eastern Europeans, Asians, blacks and Jews. Therefore, the presence of these inferior groups in the U.S. should be limited, both by constraining the growth of their populations and by restricting their entry into the nation. Rooted in science, eugenics was embraced by prominent intellectuals of the era, including Harvard psychologist William McDougall and University of Wisconsin sociologist E. A. Ross. The power of this movement is reflected by the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which virtually eliminated the entry of non-Northern Europeans to the U.S

Developments in Business Gaming A Review of the Past 40 Years

This article examines developments in business simulation gaming during the past 40 years. Covered in this article are a brief history of business games, the changing technology employed in the development and use of business games, changes in why business games are adopted and used, changes in how business games are administered, and the current state of business gaming. Readers interested in developments in other areas of simulation gaming (urban planning, social studies, ecology, economics, geography, health, etc.) are encouraged to look at other articles appearing during the 40th anniversary year of Simulation & Gaming and at the many fine articles that appeared in the silver anniversary issue of Simulation & Gaming (December 1995)

Both unmedicated and medicated individuals with schizophrenia show impairments across a wide array of cognitive and reinforcement learning tasks

BACKGROUND: Schizophrenia is a disorder characterized by pervasive deficits in cognitive functioning. However, few well-powered studies have examined the degree to which cognitive performance is impaired even among individuals with schizophrenia not currently on antipsychotic medications using a wide range of cognitive and reinforcement learning measures derived from cognitive neuroscience. Such research is particularly needed in the domain of reinforcement learning, given the central role of dopamine in reinforcement learning, and the potential impact of antipsychotic medications on dopamine function. METHODS: The present study sought to fill this gap by examining healthy controls (N = 75), unmedicated (N = 48) and medicated (N = 148) individuals with schizophrenia. Participants were recruited across five sites as part of the CNTRaCS Consortium to complete tasks assessing processing speed, cognitive control, working memory, verbal learning, relational encoding and retrieval, visual integration and reinforcement learning. RESULTS: Individuals with schizophrenia who were not taking antipsychotic medications, as well as those taking antipsychotic medications, showed pervasive deficits across cognitive domains including reinforcement learning, processing speed, cognitive control, working memory, verbal learning and relational encoding and retrieval. Further, we found that chlorpromazine equivalency rates were significantly related to processing speed and working memory, while there were no significant relationships between anticholinergic load and performance on other tasks. CONCLUSIONS: These findings add to a body of literature suggesting that cognitive deficits are an enduring aspect of schizophrenia, present in those off antipsychotic medications as well as those taking antipsychotic medications

Functional network changes and cognitive control in schizophrenia

Cognitive control is a cognitive and neural mechanism that contributes to managing the complex demands of day-to-day life. Studies have suggested that functional impairments in cognitive control associated brain circuitry contribute to a broad range of higher cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. To examine this issue, we assessed functional connectivity networks in healthy adults and individuals with schizophrenia performing tasks from two distinct cognitive domains that varied in demands for cognitive control, the RiSE episodic memory task and DPX goal maintenance task. We characterized general and cognitive control-specific effects of schizophrenia on functional connectivity within an expanded frontal parietal network (FPN) and quantified network topology properties using graph analysis. Using the network based statistic (NBS), we observed greater network functional connectivity in cognitive control demanding conditions during both tasks in both groups in the FPN, and demonstrated cognitive control FPN specificity against a task independent auditory network. NBS analyses also revealed widespread connectivity deficits in schizophrenia patients across all tasks. Furthermore, quantitative changes in network topology associated with diagnostic status and task demand were observed. The present findings, in an analysis that was limited to correct trials only, ensuring that subjects are on task, provide critical insights into network connections crucial for cognitive control and the manner in which brain networks reorganize to support such control. Impairments in this mechanism are present in schizophrenia and these results highlight how cognitive control deficits contribute to the pathophysiology of this illness