Seriousness, Irony, and Cultural Politics: A Defense of Jorge Portilla

This essay discusses Jorge Portilla’s phenomenological analysis of values and freedom in his essay, “The Phenomenology of Relajo.” Portilla argues that genuine freedom requires seriousness and sincerity; it requires wholehearted participation in cultural practices that one finds truly valuable. To support his argument, Portilla examines the ways that values and freedom are undermined when cultural practices are disrupted and break down as a result of the antics of the so-called "relajiento," a kind of “class clown” figure in Mexican culture who refuses to take anything seriously. Carlos Sánchez has criticized Portilla's rejection of the relajiento, suggesting that the relajiento’s disruptive behavior may be a liberatory act of defiance against the legacy of colonialism. I argue, however, that Portilla was right to see the relajiento’s behavior as counterproductive in the fight for liberation from oppression

Prospects of a Dusselian Ethics of Liberation among US Minorities: The Case of Affirmative Action in Higher Education

This paper proposes an application of Enrique Dussel’s ethics of liberation to an issue of crucial importance to US minorities: the debate on affirmative action. Over the past fifty years, this debate has been framed in terms of the opposition between advocates of affirmative action who claim that it is needed in order to achieve the integration and participation of traditionally oppressed groups to society without which there is no equality of rights, and critics who argue that affirmative action violates equality by enforcing a double standard that undermines the ideal of a color-blind society. In this paper, I show how the basic principles of Dussel’s ethical theory (which are best expounded in his book Ethics of Liberation) allow us to address what I take to be the main demands of both advocates and critics of affirmative action in a satisfactory way

Career Development Program for Refugee and Migrant Youth

The Career Guidance for Refugee and Migrant Young People project is an initiative of the South Metropolitan Migrant Resource Centre funded by the Department of Education and Training. It aims to develop, pilot and evaluate a career development and planning program that specifically meets the learning levels and needs of refugee youth with low levels of education, cultural life skills and English language ability

Optimal Trade and Environmental Policies in a Polluted Small Open Economy

Using a pollution-trade general equilibrium model I investigate the theoretical relationship between trade and environmental policies and their welfare effects in a perfectly competitive small open economy, facing trade and pollution distortions. Pollution does harm consumers but does not affect the productivity of neighboring firms and is generated as a by-product of the production process through the industrial use of a pure intermediate input. The final tradable good and the intermediate input are produced with a constant returns to scale technology where non-tradable primary factors of production are offered inelastically. In this framework there are three instruments considered: a tariff on a final good, a pollution tax and a tariff on the imports of the pollution-creating intermediate input.optimal policies, intermediate pollutant input, welfare, small open economy

Do Longer Delays Matter? The Effect of Prolonging Delay in CTL Activation

The activation of a specific immune response takes place in the lymphoid organs such as the spleen. We present here a simplified model of the proliferation of specific immune cells in the form of a single delay equation. We show that the system can undergo switches in stability as the delay is increased, and we interpret these results in the context of sustaining an effective immune response to a dendritic cell vaccine.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Presented at the 8th AIMS Conference on Dynamical Systems, Differential Equations and Applications that took place in Dresden, Germany, May 25-28, 201

A robust method for cluster analysis

Let there be given a contaminated list of n R^d-valued observations coming from g different, normally distributed populations with a common covariance matrix. We compute the ML-estimator with respect to a certain statistical model with n-r outliers for the parameters of the g populations; it detects outliers and simultaneously partitions their complement into g clusters. It turns out that the estimator unites both the minimum-covariance-determinant rejection method and the well-known pooled determinant criterion of cluster analysis. We also propose an efficient algorithm for approximating this estimator and study its breakdown points for mean values and pooled SSP matrix.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053604000000940 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Bridging Community, Research, and Action: An Emerging Center on Latino Youth Development (FOCUS)

This NCCD FOCUS is an update on the community conversations held across California with Latino community stakeholders on the status of Latino youth and the creation of a Center on Latino Youth Development

Dynamical gauge fields and anomalous transport at strong coupling

Anomalous transport coefficients are known to be universal in the absence of dynamical gauge fields. We calculate the corrections to these universal values due to dynamical gluon fields at strong coupling, at finite temperature and finite density, using the holographic duality. We show that the consistent chiral magnetic and chiral vortical currents receive no corrections, while we derive a semi-analytic formula for the chiral separation conductivity. We determine these corrections in the large color, large flavor limit, in terms of a series expansion in the anomalous dimension $\Delta$ of the axial current in terms of physical parameters $\Delta$, temperature, electric and chiral chemical potentials and the flavor to color ratio $\frac{N_f}{N_c}$. Our results are applicable to a generic class of chiral gauge theories that allow for a holographic description in the gravity approximation. We also determine the dynamical gluon corrections to the chiral vortical separation current in a particular example in the absence of external axial fields.Comment: 28 pages + appendices, 3 figure