Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest, by Melissa Sevigny

Book Revie

Judicially Sanctioned Environmental Injustice: Making the Case for Medical Monitoring

Across the United States, families are getting ready to start their day. The kids are waking up and brushing their teeth, the toast is being buttered, and the newspaper is being retrieved from the curb. However, in some communities this scene is playing out against the backdrop of a toxic legacy dating back to the American industrial revolution. In the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico, families are waking up to the smell of gasoline and the sound of idling trains. Around the harbor in New Bedford, Massachusetts, families are unable to sit down to a locally sourced seafood dinner. And in Rockford, Michigan, families are driving to Wal-Mart to purchase yet another case of bottled water because their wells are still unusable. Any of these families, however, wishing to receive regular medical screenings for diseases caused by exposure to toxic or hazardous substances will need to pay for those screenings themselves. Despite a well-articulated and enforced “polluter pays principle,” the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) does not provide private recovery for preventive medical care. This article explores the federal judicial decisions that have deprived communities of an ability to protect themselves from the long-term, often latent, health effects of toxic exposure; provides a broad survey of various state common law approaches; and suggests possible avenues to address this problem without fundamentally changing the regulatory or enforcement scheme of CERCLA

Energy Webs and Nursing Praxis: Patterning in the Lived Experience of Type 2 Diabetes

Diabetes is an illness best described as costly, complex, chronic, and epidemic in the United States, affecting nearly 24 million children and adults; 90% of who have type 2 diabetes (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2008). On average, every 20 seconds in the United States, an individual 20 years of age and older receives a diagnosis of diabetes; yet, an estimated 6 million people with the disease remain undiagnosed (American Diabetes Association, 2010b). The financial burden of this disease, the inconsistent effectiveness of well-intentioned diabetes programs to educate and actualize change behavior, and the limited resources of millions of Americans give testimony to the need for a paradigm shift in diabetes care. Nursing is called to envision and actualize this paradigm shift. Using a hermeneutic dialectic approach based on a unitary transformative perspective as described by Margaret Newman in her theory of health as expanding consciousness (1994), this Doctor of Nursing Practice research project is an inquiry into the potential benefit of approaching “diabetes care” through nursing praxis. “There is a need for a shift from…eliminating the problem to the more inclusive perspective of helping people recognize the meaning of their lives when disease occurs” (Newman, 2008, p. 2). The Energy Web resulted as an emergent method and served as a visual tool that guided efforts to identify and enhance pattern recognition for both the nurse researcher and the participant. Use of praxis to illuminate choice points, the treasures and trappings in the lived experience of type 2 diabetes, to inform nursing practice opens possibilities of a transformative potential toward diabetes care engagement

Hyperfine characterization and coherence lifetime extension in Pr3+:La2(WO4)3

Rare-earth ions in dielectric crystals are interesting candidates for storing quantum states of photons. A limiting factor on the optical density and thus the conversion efficiency is the distortion introduced in the crystal by doping elements of one type into a crystal matrix of another type. Here, we investigate the system Pr3+:La2(WO4)3, where the similarity of the ionic radii of Pr and La minimizes distortions due to doping. We characterize the praseodymium hyperfine interaction of the ground state (3H4) and one excited state (1D2) and determine the spin Hamiltonian parameters by numerical analysis of Raman-heterodyne spectra, which were collected for a range of static external magnetic field strengths and orientations. On the basis of a crystal field analysis, we discuss the physical origin of the experimentally determined quadrupole and Zeeman tensor characteristics. We show the potential for quantum memory applications by measuring the spin coherence lifetime in a magnetic field that is chosen such that additional magnetic fields do not shift the transition frequency in first order. Experimental results demonstrate a spin coherence lifetime of 158 ms - almost three orders of magnitude longer than in zero field.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure