[Review of] Rodolfo O. De La Garza, Frank D. Bean, Charles M. Bonjean, Ricardo Romo, and Rodolfo Alvarez, eds. The Mexican American Experience: An Interdisciplinary Anthology

Mexican-Americans comprise the second largest minority group in the United States and one of the most rapidly growing elements in the population. Their history in the American southwest goes back almost four hundred years, they have interacted with Anglo·Americans in that region since the early nineteenth century, and have been the most numerous immigrant group coming to the United States since the middle of the twentieth century. Despite this clear evidence of their significance and their impact on this country, scholars in the social sciences have often neglected this ethnic group in their research and writing. This volume makes an effort to correct the oversight

[Review of] Dirk Hoerder, ed. The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s-70s (Three volumes)

Dirk Hoerder has undertaken a truly mammoth task -- the identification, analysis, and the location of surviving collections of the immigrant labor press published in the United States and Canada from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. For the most part his efforts have been successful. Without question he has provided researchers interested in the American immigrant experience or American labor history with a valuable research tool

[Review of] Langston Hughes. I Wonder As I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey

I Wonder As I Wander, originally published in 1956, is the second and last volume of Langston Hughes\u27s autobiography. In the first volume, The Big Sea, Hughes focused on his early life and his involvement in the Harlem Renaissance; to a large degree it constitutes his memoirs of the Harlem Renaissance. I Wonder As I Wander is more personal. It is an account of his experiences and his musings during the 1930s, after he had distanced himself from the Harlem Renaissance, while he was in the most political phase of his long career, and while his travels took him across the United States and to the most exciting and troubled areas of the world -- the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, China during the chaotic days preceding the Japanese invasion, Japan during the period when the military was consolidating its power, and Spain during its civil war. During his wanderings Hughes crossed paths with some of his generation\u27s most interesting people. He traveled across Soviet Central Asia with Arthur Koestler and dined with Madam [Madame] Sun Yat Sen in Shanghai. However, the most vivid and interesting sections of the book describe his encounter with common people, often black, often vagabonds like himself -- Emma, the black mammy of Moscow, or Teddy Weatherford, the black jazz musician who befriended him in Shanghai

[Review of] Vernon J. Williams. From a Caste to a Minority: Changing Attitudes of American Sociologists Towards Afro-Americans

Attitudes towards specific racial minorities have been central to the history of the United States. These attitudes have influenced the development of social and cultural institutions, they have determined the structure of our communities, and they have affected our laws and our politics. Given the centrality of race in American culture, it is surprising that until the second half of the twentieth century there was little effort to examine systematically the role of race in US history, or to examine changing attitudes towards race; and the efforts that were made rarely made it into the mainstream of American historiography

[Review of] K. Sue Jewell. Survival of the Black Family: The Institutional Impact of U.S. Social Policy

The impact and effectiveness of the social programs that emerged during the New Deal and were expanded in the Great Society have become seriously debated questions in the conservative 1980s and 1990s. Liberals accept as an article of faith the necessity of federal welfare programs to counter the economic injustice that seems inherent in American capitalism and to reverse the results of generations of racism and inequality; conservatives, on the other hand, contend that federal welfare programs are at best inefficient, and more likely, destructive of initiative and economic progress among the very groups that they are designed to assist, and consequently, should be dismantled. A subset of this debate centers on the impact of US social policy during the last half century on African Americans -- especially on the black family

Extracting the depolarization coefficient D_NN from data measured with a full acceptance detector

The spin transfer from vertically polarized beam protons to Lambda or Sigma hyperons of the associated strangeness production pp -> pK Lambda (Sigma) is described with the depolarization coefficient D_NN. As the polarization of the hyperons is determined by their weak decays, detectors, which have a large acceptance for the decay particles, are needed. In this paper a formula is derived, which describes the depolarization coefficient D_NN by count rates of a 4 pi detector. It is shown, that formulas, which are given in publications for detectors with restricted acceptance, are specific cases of this formula for a 4 pi detector.Comment: Accepted for publication by Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section

Linking mechanistic and behavioral responses to sublethal esfenvalerate exposure in the endangered delta smelt; Hypomesus transpacificus (Fam. Osmeridae)

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The delta smelt (<it>Hypomesus transpacificus</it>) is a pelagic fish species listed as endangered under both the USA Federal and Californian State Endangered Species Acts and considered an indicator of ecosystem health in its habitat range, which is limited to the Sacramento-San Joaquin estuary in California, USA. Anthropogenic contaminants are one of multiple stressors affecting this system, and among them, current-use insecticides are of major concern. Interrogative tools are required to successfully monitor effects of contaminants on the delta smelt, and to research potential causes of population decline in this species. We have created a microarray to investigate genome-wide effects of potentially causative stressors, and applied this tool to assess effects of the pyrethroid insecticide esfenvalerate on larval delta smelt. Selected genes were further investigated as molecular biomarkers using quantitative PCR analyses.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Exposure to esfenvalerate affected swimming behavior of larval delta smelt at concentrations as low as 0.0625 μg.L^-1, and significant differences in expression were measured in genes involved in neuromuscular activity. Alterations in the expression of genes associated with immune responses, along with apoptosis, redox, osmotic stress, detoxification, and growth and development appear to have been invoked by esfenvalerate exposure. Swimming impairment correlated significantly with expression of aspartoacylase (ASPA), an enzyme involved in brain cell function and associated with numerous human diseases. Selected genes were investigated for their use as molecular biomarkers, and strong links were determined between measured downregulation in ASPA and observed behavioral responses in fish exposed to environmentally relevant pyrethroid concentrations.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results of this study show that microarray technology is a useful approach in screening for, and generation of molecular biomarkers in endangered, non-model organisms, identifying specific genes that can be directly linked with sublethal toxicological endpoints; such as changes in expression levels of neuromuscular genes resulting in measurable swimming impairments. The developed microarrays were successfully applied on larval fish exposed to esfenvalerate, a known contaminant of the Sacramento-San Joaquin estuary, and has permitted the identification of specific biomarkers which could provide insight into the factors contributing to delta smelt population decline.</p

Flavor Changing Effects in Family Nonuniversal Z' Models

Flavor-changing and CP-violating interactions of Z' to fermions are generally present in models with extra U(1) gauge symmetry that are string-inspired or related to broken gauged family symmetry. We study the consequences of such couplings in fermion electric dipole moments, muon g-2, and K and B meson mixings. From experimental limits or measured values, we constrain the off-diagonal Z' couplings to fermions. Some of these constraints are comparable or stronger than the existing constraints obtained from other observables.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure

Straightening of Thermal Fluctuations in Semi-Flexible Polymers by Applied Tension

We investigate the propagation of a suddenly applied tension along a thermally excited semi-flexible polymer using analytical approximations, scaling arguments and numerical simulation. This problem is inherently non-linear. We find sub-diffusive propagation with a dynamical exponent of 1/4. By generalizing the internal elasticity, we show that tense strings exhibit qualitatively different tension profiles and propagation with an exponent of 1/2.Comment: Latex file; with three postscript figures; .ps available at http://dept.physics.upenn.edu/~nelson/pull.p

First Model-Independent Measurement of the Spin Triplet pΛp\Lambda Scattering Length from Final State Interaction in the p⃗p→pK+Λ\vec{p}p \rightarrow pK^{+}\Lambda Reaction

The $\vec{p}p \rightarrow pK^{+}\Lambda$ reaction has been measured with the COSY-TOF detector at a beam momentum of $2.7\,\mathrm{GeV}/c$. The polarized proton beam enables the measurement of the beam analyzing power by the asymmetry of the produced kaon ($A_N^{K}$). This observable allows the $p\Lambda$ spin triplet scattering length to be extracted for the first time model independently from the final-state interaction in the reaction. The obtained value is $a_{t} = (-2.55 ^{+0.72}_{-1.39} {}_{\textrm{stat.}} \pm 0.6_{\textrm{syst.}} \pm 0.3_{\textrm{theo.}})\mathrm{fm}$. This value is compatible with theoretical predictions and results from model-dependent analyses.Comment: Revised version as accepted for publication in PR