What Am I - Chopped Suey?: Belonging and the Ambivalent Taste of American Exceptionalism

This paper analyzes the stories of movement and displacement told through iconic Chinese and Jewish “ethnic” immigrant foods that have become part of American cuisine. Jewish and Chinese immigrant groups exemplify the American “model minority” myth. The ways in which some immigrant foods have been embraced or adapted into Anglo-dominant American culture reflects complex histories of their creators’ migration and assimilation. Immigrant foods complicate efforts to define a common American cuisine. When, if ever, do “ethnic” foods become “American”? Yet trying to identify “American cuisine” smacks of “American exceptionalism”— the superiority-tinged idea that the United States differs from all other nations and is intrinsic to how we have defined our national cuisine and differentiated it from its global influences. There is an inherent dissonance celebrating hyphenated American foods without acknowledging America’s history of Asian exclusion, Native American removal, colonial conquest and exploitation, and the transatlantic slave trade. Though we share a national identity and the cultural facets that come with that, ethnic-inflected American foods and tastes remind us of the diverse histories of people becoming American. We, the Jewish-American authors of this paper, find affinities between our food stories and those of Chinese Americans, which embody the displacement, nostalgia, and loss that come with our so-called “model minority” status. To illustrate the complexity of histories and identities in creative American ethnic fusion foods, we focus on a couple of foods from Chinese American and Jewish American immigrant cuisines: sweet-and-sour batter-fried dishes like slippery shrimp, and chocolate babka and rugelach

Prospects in the orbital and rotational dynamics of the Moon with the advent of sub-centimeter lunar laser ranging

Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) measurements are crucial for advanced exploration of the laws of fundamental gravitational physics and geophysics. Current LLR technology allows us to measure distances to the Moon with a precision approaching 1 millimeter. As NASA pursues the vision of taking humans back to the Moon, new, more precise laser ranging applications will be demanded, including continuous tracking from more sites on Earth, placing new CCR arrays on the Moon, and possibly installing other devices such as transponders, etc. Successful achievement of this goal strongly demands further significant improvement of the theoretical model of the orbital and rotational dynamics of the Earth-Moon system. This model should inevitably be based on the theory of general relativity, fully incorporate the relevant geophysical processes, lunar librations, tides, and should rely upon the most recent standards and recommendations of the IAU for data analysis. This paper discusses methods and problems in developing such a mathematical model. The model will take into account all the classical and relativistic effects in the orbital and rotational motion of the Moon and Earth at the sub-centimeter level. The new model will allow us to navigate a spacecraft precisely to a location on the Moon. It will also greatly improve our understanding of the structure of the lunar interior and the nature of the physical interaction at the core-mantle interface layer. The new theory and upcoming millimeter LLR will give us the means to perform one of the most precise fundamental tests of general relativity in the solar system.Comment: 26 pages, submitted to Proc. of ASTROCON-IV conference (Princeton Univ., NJ, 2007

RNA content in motor and sensory neurons and surrounding neuroglia of mouse spinal cord under conditions of hypodynamia and following normalization

Male white mice were subjected to two and three week hypodynamia and then decapitated. Cytoplasmic RNA content per cell was measured by means of ultraviolet cytospectrometry. Changes in RNA content are shown, and the dynamics of the reparative processes of cells are discussed

RNA content in motor and sensory neurons and surrounding neuroglia of mouse spinal cord under conditions of hypodynamia and following normalization

The differences in the dynamics of reparative processes in RNA metabolism within the neuron-neuroglia unit after the cessation of hyper- and hypodynamia is dicussed. The role of neuroglia is stressed in compensatory, reparative and trophic processes in the nervous system as well as the possibility in an adaptation at the cellular level

Comment on "The gravitomagnetic influence on gyroscopes and on the lunar orbit"

Analysis of the gauge residual freedom in the relativistic theory of lunar motion demonstrates that lunar laser ranging (LLR) is not currently capable to detect gravitomagnetic effects.Comment: 1 page, accepted to Physical Review Letter

A study of the impact graphing calculators have on the achievement in high school pre calculus

The use of graphing calculators in high school mathematics has long been debated. The transformation of function, in particular, parabolas, was studied and it was shown that there was no loss of achievement in Pre-Calculus classes with the use of graphing calculators. Assessments examined the impact of the graphing calculator on the conceptual knowledge of the topics by testing the students without the graphing calculator and with the graphing calculators. Five classes of pre calculus students (two classes who used graphing calculators and three who did not) were used in the study. The same students were used in the before and after assessments to more accurately analyze the impact of the graphing calculator on learning. After the second assessment, the students were given a survey using Likert-type items to investigate the attitude towards the graphing calculator as a teaching tool. This survey was divided into two parts; the ability to use a graphing calculator and the effect graphing calculators has on the mathematics experience

Binary spinning black hole Hamiltonian in canonical center-of-mass and rest-frame coordinates through higher post-Newtonian order

The recently constructed Hamiltonians for spinless binary black holes through third post-Newtonian order and for spinning ones through formal second post-Newtonian order, where the spins are counted of zero post-Newtonian order, are transformed into fully canonical center-of-mass and rest-frame variables. The mixture terms in the Hamiltonians between center-of-mass and rest-frame variables are in accordance with the relation between the total linear momentum and the center-of-mass velocity as demanded by global Lorentz invariance. The various generating functions for the center-of-mass and rest-frame canonical variables are explicitly given in terms of the single-particle canonical variables. The no-interaction theorem does not apply because the world-line condition of Lorentz covariant position variables is not imposed.Comment: 18 pages, no figure