Change in American Indian World Views Illustrated by Oral Narratives and Contemporary Poetry

Unlike other ethnic groups, American Indians had little to celebrate during the bicentennial year in 1976. Other ethnic groups, with the exception of blacks and Mexican Americans, came to America to find a better way of life.[1] In contrast, few American Indians have left this country in search of a better life elsewhere. Hence, being an oppressed minority in a society governed by Western thought and values, Indians can only lament the loss of their rights to live and govern their lives according to particular religious, cultural, and social values, for they have been forced to change world views and way of life under both the overt and covert pressures of Euroamerican society

[Review of] Charles F. Lummis. Pueblo Indian Folk-Stories

Pueblo Indian Folk-Stories is composed of forty-two stories (tales) that range from the teachings (and/or) exploits of Coyote to the adventures of the Wise Bear. These folk tales were collected and translated from Spanish to English, as well as interpreted by the late Charles F. Lummis. The original title of this book was Tile Mall Who Married the Moon, published in 1894 by Century Company New York. This Bison edition is a reprint of another version published in 1910 by Century Company New York; being expanded and retitled. It also has an informative, new introduction by Robert F. Gish. In it we get a historical view of the old pueblo cultures of the Southwest, especially Isleta. The older introduction mainly deals with Indian storytellers and their folklore, focusing on Isleta oral tradition

[Review of] Mariano Azuela. The Underdogs

The Underdogs (Los De Abajo) is a classic novel of the Mexican Revolution. The foreword briefly covers Mexican history, from Spanish Conquest to Independence to Revolution. Its purpose is to focus upon the main sociopolitical and economic problems of the Mexican Revolution

Dissipative dynamics of a two - level system resonantly coupled to a harmonic mode

We propose an approximation scheme to describe the dynamics of the spin-boson model when the spectral density of the environment shows a peak at a characteristic frequency $\Omega$ which can be very close (or even equal) to the spin Zeeman frequency $\Delta$. Mapping the problem onto a two-state system (TSS) coupled to a harmonic oscillator (HO) with frequency $\omega_0$ we show that the representation of displaced HO states provides an appropriate basis to truncate the Hilbert space of the TSS-HO system and therefore a better picture of the system dynamics. We derive an effective Hamiltonian for the TSS-HO system, and show it furnishes a very good approximation for the system dynamics even when its two subsystems are moderately coupled. Finally, assuming the regime of weak HO-bath coupling and low temperatures, we are able to analytically evaluate the dissipative TSS dynamics.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures; V2: Published versio

Geometric interpretation of pre-vitrification in hard sphere liquids

We derive a microscopic criterion for the stability of hard sphere configurations, and we show empirically that this criterion is marginally satisfied in the glass. This observation supports a geometric interpretation for the initial rapid rise of viscosity with packing fraction, or pre-vitrification. It also implies that barely stable soft modes characterize the glass structure, whose spatial extension is estimated. We show that both the short-term dynamics and activation processes occur mostly along those soft modes, and we study some implications of these observations. This article synthesizes new and previous results [C. Brito and M. Wyart, Euro. Phys. Letters, {\bf 76}, 149-155, (2006) and C. Brito and M. Wyart, J. Stat. Mech., L08003 (2007) ] in a unified view.Comment: accepted for publication in the Journal of Chemical Physics (added discussion on RCP and ideal glass transition