Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohatas In the Heart of the Valley of Love

In an interview for the journal MELUS, Hsiu-chuan Lee claims that Cynthia Kadohata suggests her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love does not directly take any specific ethnicity as its central concern, nor deal explicitly with the identity issue (165, 179). Despite these assertions by the author, In the Heart of the Valley of Love is mainly taught at the university level in Asian American Literature courses. While Kadohatas novel has been established within this specific canon of Asian American Literature, her novel deals with issues that resonate among all racial groups. This paper considers the ways in which Kadohata creates an imagined future not wholly detached from issues of race and identity, but where the conceptualization of race-based identity is conceived by means of self-fashioning and self-signifying. In the novels futuristic American society, concerns of class and the divides of wealth between the white richtowns and the multiracial majority may seem to be the central themes, but issues of race and issues of class become conflated in the novel, and Kadohata uses more subtle ways to discuss issues of racial difference. What Kadohata suggests through her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love is not that racialized bodies cease to be of importance in American society, but that race as a critical factor in identity formation and categorization must be reframed by self-signification and social interactions

Excursus on Hapa; or the Fate of Identity

This paper focuses on the contradictions and tensions inherent in self-identification and oppositional identities. In the past twenty years, Hapa has emerged as an oppositional identity used by mixed-race Asian Americans. While many scholars have noted the tension of the term for its linguistic appropriation from the Native Hawaiian language, fewer scholars have concentrated their examinations on the ways in which the term reproduces the very notions it aims to subvert. This paper concentrates on the areas of contradiction inherent in finding and using a word of power and making that word into a recognizable identity

Glass transition of soft colloids

We explore the glassy dynamics of soft colloids using microgels and charged particles interacting by steric and screened Coulomb interactions, respectively. In the supercooled regime, the structural relaxation time τα of both systems grows steeply with volume fraction, reminiscent of the behavior of colloidal hard spheres. Computer simulations confirm that the growth of τα on approaching the glass transition is independent of particle softness. By contrast, softness becomes relevant at very large packing fractions when the system falls out of equilibrium. In this nonequilibrium regime, τα depends surprisingly weakly on packing fraction, and time correlation functions exhibit a compressed exponential decay consistent with stress-driven relaxation. The transition to this novel regime coincides with the onset of an anomalous decrease in local order with increasing density typical of ultrasoft systems. We propose that these peculiar dynamics results from the combination of the nonequilibrium aging dynamics expected in the glassy state and the tendency of colloids interacting through soft potentials to refluidize at high packing fractions

Restricted Horizons and the Boundaries of Hope: A Research Study of Primary Teen Pregnancy Prevention of African-Americans in Kern County

Teen pregnancy is a social and economic issue which has been a problem in this country for many years. The United States has a high teen pregnancy rate as compared to other industrialized nations. Approximately 54 births occur per 1000 girls ages 15-19 in the United States. Repeat teen pregnancy is also a serious problem which compounds the negative outcomes for adolescent mothers and their children. It is estimated that 20-25% of all teens who become pregnant will do so again within 12-24 months. African-American adolescents have a repeat pregnancy rate that is greater than that of European-American teens and they also incur the additional health risks of pregnancy. The problems extend to the next generation. Boys born to adolescent mothers are 2.7 times more likely to become incarcerated as juveniles or as an adult. Daughters of teen mothers are more likely to become teen mother[s] themselves, which can create a generational cycle of teen pregnancy in some families which leads to cycling of poverty and economic hardship. Although teen pregnancy rates have steadily decreased since 1991, the greatest decline was among African-Americans. Even with this decrease the national, state, and local figures indicate that African-American teens still have higher teen pregnancy rates than Caucasians or Hispanics. Locally, Kern County African-American teens had the highest rate of pregnancy from 1994-1998 with minimal decreases within the last 5 years. The Kern County Department of Public Health (1998) estimates that the incidence of African-American teen births begin to occur at 13 years of age and then increase substantially for each age until ages 18-19 where the incidence peaks. The purpose of this study was to discover if local efforts to decrease the number of African-American teen pregnancies have been successful. This study suggests three significant findings related to teen pregnancy in Kern County. First, there is a serious lack of primary pregnancy prevention in Kern County, especially for African-American teens. Second, secondary prevention and support services significantly outnumber primary pregnancy prevention services. Third, while teen pregnancy is a multidimensional issue (socio-economic, psychosocial, familial, sociocultural, educational) which demands a multidimensional approach, the local programs generally lack this approach. It is recommended that leadership and collaboration among primary pregnancy prevention service providers should be developed. Education of the public (community and parents) by primary pregnancy prevention service providers could proactively educate the public about elements of primary pregnancy prevention. Parents need to be viewed as partners and incorporated into primary prevention programs and strategies. Promotion of early and repetitive family life skills / reproductive health information education, as well as improvement of the evaluation process for primary pregnancy prevention programs, is crucial

Measurement and interpretation of isoprene fluxes and isoprene, methacrolein, and methyl vinyl ketone mixing ratios at the PROPHET site during the 1998 Intensive

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95460/1/jgrd8697.pd

On the deep minimum state in the Seyfert galaxy MCG-6-30-15

(abridged) We present a detailed spectral analysis of the first observation of the Seyfert 1 galaxy MCG-6-30-15 by the European Photon Imaging Camera on board the XMM-Newton observatory, together with contemporaneous data from the Proportional Counter Array on the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer. Confirming our previously published result, we find that the presence of extremely broadened reflection features from an ionized relativistic accretion disk is required even when one employs the latest X-ray reflection models and includes the effect of complex absorption. The extremely broadened reflection features are also present if the primary continuum is modeled with a thermal Comptonisation spectrum rather than a simple power-law continuum. With this fact established, we examine these data using a relativistic smearing function corresponding to a ``generalized thin accretion disk'' model. We find strong evidence for torquing of the central parts of the accretion disk (presumably through magnetic interactions with the plunging region of the disk and/or the rotating black hole itself). We also perform a study of spectral variability within our observation. We find that the disk reflection features maintain roughly a constant equivalent width with respect to the observed continuum, as predicted by simple reflection models. Taken together with other studies of MCG-6-30-15 that find disk features to possess constant intensity at higher flux states, we suggest that the flux of disk features undergoes a saturation once the source emerges from a Deep Minimum state.Comment: 16 pages, accepted for publication in MNRA

ENSEMBLE KALMAN FILTER EXPERIMENTS WITH A PRIMITIVE-EQUATION GLOBAL MODEL

The ultimate goal is to develop a path towards an operational ensemble Kalman filtering (EnKF) system. Several approaches to EnKF for atmospheric systems have been proposed but not systematically compared. The sensitivity of EnKF to the imperfections of forecast models is unclear. This research explores two questions: 1. What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of two promising EnKF methods? 2. How large are the effects of model errors on data assimilation, and can they be reduced by model bias correction? Chapter 2 contains a theoretical review, followed by the FORTRAN development and testing of two EnKF methods: a serial ensemble square root filter (serial EnSRF, Whitaker and Hamill 2002) and a local EnKF (LEKF, Ott et al. 2002; 2004). We reproduced the results obtained by Whitaker and Hamill (2002) and Ott et al. (2004) on the Lorenz (1996) model. If we localize the LEKF error covariance, LEKF outperforms serial EnSRF. We also introduce a method to objectively estimate the optimal covariance inflation. In Chapter 3 we apply the two EnKF methods and the three-dimensional variational method (3DVAR) to the SPEEDY primitive-equation global model (Molteni 2003), a fast but relatively realistic model. Perfect model experiments show that EnKF greatlyoutperforms 3DVAR. The 2-day forecast ”errors of the day ” are very similar to the analysis errors, but they are not similar among different methods except in low ensemble dimensional regions. Overall, serial EnSRF outperforms LEKF, but their difference is substantially reduced if we localize the LEKF error covariance or increase the ensemble size. Since LEKF is much more efficient than serial EnSRF when using parallel computers and many observations, LEKF would be the only feasible choice in operations. In Chapter 4 we remove the perfect model assumption using the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis as the ”nature” run. The advantage of EnKF to 3DVAR is reduced. When we apply the model bias estimation proposed by Dee and da Silva (1998), we find that the full dimensional model bias estimation fails. However, if instead we assume that the bias is low dimensional, we obtain a substantial improvement in the EnKF analysis

Child Support: The Non-Custodial Parent’s Veil

The objective of this study is to explore the life of noncustodial parents. To do so, the personal impact of predetermined child support payments, the relationship with the custodial parent, and the relationship with the child were examined. This study explores whether child support is a salient factor in the daily life decisions of the noncustodial parent. By using William Edward Burghardt DuBois\u27s concept of the veil as a theoretical framework, this study investigates whether the noncustodial parent\u27s child support commitment results in an adverse effect on how that parent views himself or herself in different areas of life, versus how other members of society view them. A survey of 25 noncustodial parents was conducted. The survey included open and closed-ended questions. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze responses to the survey. This data was used to design cross tabulation charts. Then, the information was analyzed to answer the research questions