[Review of] Judith Ortiz Cofer. Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood

This is a rather loose collection of cuentos, or stories, by a person of two very different worlds. In the years of her youth, Judith Ortiz was shuttled between Paterson, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico. Her parents were immersed in the Spanish culture of the Caribbean tropics; but like so many other Puerto Ricans, her father left the island in the 1950s to secure a better life for his family. He joined the US Navy and spent six months of every year at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the rest of the time at sea. When he was stationed in Brooklyn, he would send for his wife and children to live with him in an apartment outside Paterson. Thus, young Judith spent her childhood years alternately living in a small town on a tropical island and in a large urban area in North America. Her father adjusted to the new culture, but her mother never did

The Role of General Principles in EU Private International Law and the Perspectives of a Codification in the Field

The Article examines the role of general principles within the European system of private international law, with the following summary: 1. Introduction: the three different categories of general principles relevant for the construction of an EU system of private international law. 2. The general principles of private international law and the general principles of law common to most legal systems. 3. The general principles of EU law and their role in the development and the completion of the system. 4. The role of general principles and the uncertain perspectives of the adoption of an EU code of private international law

Energy Converter with Inside Two, Three, and Five Connected H2/Air Swirling Combustor Chambers: Solar and Combustion Mode Investigations

This work reports the performance of an energy converter characterized by an emitting parallelepiped element with inside two, three, or five swirling connected combustion chambers. In particular, the idea is to adopt the heat released by H2/air combustion, occurring in the connected swirling chambers, to heat up the emitting surfaces of the thermally-conductive emitting parallelepiped brick. The final goal consists in obtaining the highest emitting surface temperature and the highest power delivered to the ambient environment, with the simultaneous fulfillment of four design constraints: dimension of the emitting surface fixed to 30 30 mm2, solar mode thermal efficiency greater than 20%, emitting surface peak temperature T > 1000 K, and its relative DT 99.9%, and high peak temperature, but the emitting surface DT is strongly sensitive to the geometrical configuration. The present work is related to the “EU-FP7-HRC-Power” project, aiming at developing micro-meso hybrid sources of power, compatible with a thermal/electrical conversion by thermo-photovoltaic cells