[Review of] Elizabeth Martinez. De Colores Means All Of Us

Elizabeth Martinez, well known San Franciscan activist, author and journalist, in her most recent work endeavors to connect the movements of the 90s with the crucible of the 60s. Her narrative of the course of contemporary activism and insurgence in the United States gives the reader an introspective look into the underbelly of Chicano/Chicana activism in the 60s and the resultant conflicts which ensued from not initially addressing issues of sexism, classism and machismo within the Movimiento. She provocatively talks about the utilization of chingon politics and the suppression of the Chicana feminist voice which has ultimately led to attempts to redefine and reconstitute the Movimiento

Revisiting Factors Associated with the Success of Ballot Initiatives with a Substantial Rail Transit Component, Research Report 10-13

This report presents the replication of an MTI study conducted in 2001 by Peter Haas and Richard Werbel. That research, itself a continuation of an earlier project completed in 2000, included an analysis of transportation tax elections in 11 urban areas across the nation and culminated in the identification of 17 community-level factors with potential impact on the success of ballot measures for sales tax increases to fund transportation packages with substantial rail components. Trends observed in these more recent case studies were generally highly consistent with the following findings from the 2001 study. Thus this analysis reaffirms the importance for community consensus amongst the business, elected and environmental communities, and accompanying depth of financial support. Once again, the difficulty of passing an initiative without well-funded, effective use of multimedia was validated, as was the importance of utilizing experienced campaign consultants. Some factors seemed less important in the current study than in 2001, including the effectiveness of presenting a multimodal package, the perception of benefits of a package being distributed throughout the voting district, the experience gained in recent transit elections, and the credibility of the transit agency. Finally, this compilation includes an exploration of “rebound” elections – those instances in which a failed measure is quickly followed by a successful one – and the factors that seem linked to achieving success in such instances

Editor\u27s Notes

As a nation there is probably no greater dividing point for most Americans than the topic of immigration. For the past eight years the American Congress has sought to establish a comprehensive immigration policy and pass sweeping legislation that seeks to define who is eligible to be an American citizen and resident and who will be ultimately included or excluded in terms of naturalization and citizenship. Recent failed attempts to pass a Dream Act to legitimate scores of immigrant children and young adults who have resided in the United States nearly all their lives, and in many cases have no conception of any other culture or national entity, illustrates both the urgency and complexity of projected legislation. Millions will ultimately be affected in terms of their status and identity

Relativistic Quark Model Calculation of the l1, l2 Coefficients of the Chiral Lagrangian

We briefly report on a relativistic quark model scheme to calculate the O(P^4) pion-pion vertex in the planar approximation and in the chiral limit. The calculation is reduced to the solution of simple integral equations (Bethe-Salpeter like) by an effective use of chiral Ward Identities. Specific model computations are provided.Comment: Proc. V Intnal. Conf. on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, Gargnano,Italy 200

Distributional versions of Littlewood's Tauberian theorem

We provide several general versions of Littlewood's Tauberian theorem. These versions are applicable to Laplace transforms of Schwartz distributions. We apply these Tauberian results to deduce a number of Tauberian theorems for power series where Ces\`{a}ro summability follows from Abel summability. We also use our general results to give a new simple proof of the classical Littlewood one-sided Tauberian theorem for power series.Comment: 15 page

Communicability betweenness in complex networks

Betweenness measures provide quantitative tools to pick out fine details from the massive amount of interaction data that is available from large complex networks. They allow us to study the extent to which a node takes part when information is passed around the network. Nodes with high betweenness may be regarded as key players that have a highly active role. At one extreme, betweenness has been defined by considering information passing only through the shortest paths between pairs of nodes. At the other extreme, an alternative type of betweenness has been defined by considering all possible walks of any length. In this work, we propose a betweenness measure that lies between these two opposing viewpoints. We allow information to pass through all possible routes, but introduce a scaling so that longer walks carry less importance. This new definition shares a similar philosophy to that of communicability for pairs of nodes in a network, which was introduced by Estrada and Hatano [E. Estrada, N. Hatano, Phys. Rev. E 77 (2008) 036111]. Having defined this new communicability betweenness measure, we show that it can be characterized neatly in terms of the exponential of the adjacency matrix. We also show that this measure is closely related to a Fréchet derivative of the matrix exponential. This allows us to conclude that it also describes network sensitivity when the edges of a given node are subject to infinitesimally small perturbations. Using illustrative synthetic and real life networks, we show that the new betweenness measure behaves differently to existing versions, and in particular we show that it recovers meaningful biological information from a proteinprotein interaction network