'The Art of Being Home': Home and Travel in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Poetry

"'The Art of Being Home': Home and Travel in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Poetry" is an exploration of Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s poetics of travel and home anchored in a narrative tracking a day spent with the poet. It is a sequel to “Walking between Land and Water,” an essay published in Asiatic, in which I combine a personal encounter with the poet with an examination of the tropes of walking and liminality in her work. Here the focus is more on the motif and theme of home in the poet’s work, as the essay excavates the complexities and ambiguities of the meaning of home, from her first collection to recently published poems. This essay identifies the shifts in the poet’s idea of where and what home is, and examines how it forms a counterpoint to the poetics of travel and transnational mobility that informs her work. So far, critical attention has been more on her relationship with Malacca, her place of origin, than on her self-mappings in her adopted hometown of Santa Barbara. The essay gives a portrait of the poet at home, and highlights the increasing importance of Santa Barbara in her poetry.

Effective velocity boundary condition at a mixed slip surface

This paper studies the nature of the effective velocity boundary conditions for liquid flow over a plane boundary on which small free-slip islands are randomly distributed. It is found that, to lowest order in the area fraction $\beta$ covered by free-slip regions with characteristic size $a$, a macroscopic Navier-type slip condition emerges with a slip length of the order of $a\beta$. The study is motivated by recent experiments which suggest that gas nano-bubbles may form on solid walls and may be responsible for the appearance of a partial slip boundary conditions for liquid flow. The results are also relevant for ultra-hydrophobic surfaces exploiting the so-called ``lotus effect''.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figur

Differential Proteomic Analysis of Human Saliva using Tandem Mass Tags Quantification for Gastric Cancer Detection.

Novel biomarkers and non-invasive diagnostic methods are urgently needed for the screening of gastric cancer to reduce its high mortality. We employed quantitative proteomics approach to develop discriminatory biomarker signatures from human saliva for the detection of gastric cancer. Salivary proteins were analyzed and compared between gastric cancer patients and matched control subjects by using tandem mass tags (TMT) technology. More than 500 proteins were identified with quantification, and 48 of them showed significant difference expression (p < 0.05) between normal controls and gastric cancer patients, including 7 up-regulated proteins and 41 down-regulated proteins. Five proteins were selected for initial verification by ELISA and three were successfully verified, namely cystatin B (CSTB), triosephosphate isomerase (TPI1), and deleted in malignant brain tumors 1 protein (DMBT1). All three proteins could differentiate gastric cancer patients from normal control subjects, dramatically (p < 0.05). The combination of these three biomarkers could reach 85% sensitivity and 80% specificity for the detection of gastric cancer with accuracy of 0.93. This study provides the proof of concept of salivary biomarkers for the non-invasive detection of gastric cancer. It is highly encouraging to turn these biomarkers into an applicable clinical test after large scale validation

PyCDFT: A Python package for constrained density functional theory

We present PyCDFT, a Python package to compute diabatic states using constrained density functional theory (CDFT). PyCDFT provides an object-oriented, customizable implementation of CDFT, and allows for both single-point self-consistent-field calculations and geometry optimizations. PyCDFT is designed to interface with existing density functional theory (DFT) codes to perform CDFT calculations where constraint potentials are added to the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian. Here we demonstrate the use of PyCDFT by performing calculations with a massively parallel first-principles molecular dynamics code, Qbox, and we benchmark its accuracy by computing the electronic coupling between diabatic states for a set of organic molecules. We show that PyCDFT yields results in agreement with existing implementations and is a robust and flexible package for performing CDFT calculations. The program is available at https://github.com/hema-ted/pycdft/.Comment: main text: 27 pages, 6 figures supplementary: 7 pages, 2 figure