bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Serpentine Land Use and Health Concerns
Authors: Alexander Earl B. , Coleman Roger G. , Keeler-Wolfe Todd , Harrison Susan P.
Published: November 2020

Soils developed from serpentine (ultramafic) substrates are noted for their meager and strange biomass. The chemical infertility is the main controlling factor in the development of plants in serpentine soils (Proctor and Woodell 1975, Kruckeberg 1984, Brooks 1987). Botanists have recognized the unusual nature of the endemic plants and this has led to preserving serpentine tracts that contain rare plant species. The evolution of plant species that are restricted to serpentine has produced remarkable adaptations to survival on serpentine substrates. Kruckeberg (1984) pointed out that the long-term habitat attrition on these rare natural serpentine ecosystems requires conservation initiatives to insure their preservation. In California, private and public land managers are required to develop environmental impact studies before disturbing tracts containing serpentine bedrock and its overlying soils (Clinkenbeard et al. 2003). The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS 1998) carried out a recovery plan for 28 species of plants and animals that occur exclusively or primarily on serpentine soils and grasslands in the San Francisco Bay area. The strategy was to provide detailed actions needed to achieve self-sustaining populations of endangered species so they will no longer require protection under the Endangered Species Act. Serpentine land tracts within metropolitan areas have come under closer regulation, as there is concern of releasing naturally occurring asbestos during construction disturbances. Typical examples of disturbance would be construction sites, new road construction, and quarry excavation. Of particular concern are the large amounts of dust produced in quarry operations or unpaved gravel roads consisting of crushed serpentine rock. The dust from such sites may contain airborne asbestos fibers released from the serpentine. This asbestos-bearing dust may pose a toxic threat to the construction workers and to later occupants of homes, schools, and office buildings occupying serpentine tracts. Asbestos is the blanket term for a group of naturally occurring silicate minerals that can be separated into fibers. The fibers are strong, durable, and resistant to extreme heat. Because of these qualities, asbestos has been used in industrial, maritime, automotive, scientific, and building products.
Schools as Centers of Community: Planning and Design
Authors: Bingler Steven
Published: November 2020

As we stand at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we face a national challenge in planning and designing learning environments that meet the needs of all learners. Throughout the country, elementary and high school districts are spending unprecedented amounts of money to renovate existing school facilities or build new ones. In 2001 alone roughly $27 billion worth of kindergarten through grade 12 construction projects were approved and funded, a trend that is likely to continue for several years. In 2000 public and private kindergarten through grade 12 school enrollment reached a record 53 million students. The Department of Education projects that 55 million children will enroll in 2020 and 60 million in 2030. By 2100 the pattern of steady growth is expected to result in a total of 94 million school-age children, an increase of 41 million students over the century. It is also projected that diversity will increase, with most of the growth among Hispanic children. They represented about 15% of the public school population in 2000; that proportion is expected to grow to 24% by 2020. This steady increase in the number and diversity of school children, all of whom need and deserve a quality education, suggests that the design of new school facilities and the modernization of old ones will be an ongoing process in communities across the United States. One important component of this challenge is the need to rethink how we plan learning environments to coincide with some new ways of thinking about education. It seems as if such a short time has passed since Howard Gardner introduced the theory of multiple intelligences at a time when other educational strategies, including project-based learning, cooperative learning, primary source learning, real world experiential learning, and their many variations, were enjoying a renaissance or were in the developmental stages. Many of these teaching and learning strategies have found their way into the mainstream as powerful tools that help to create more meaning-centered and personalized learning for students and educators alike. This new group of educational strategies is more diverse, more integrated, and, perhaps, more compelling than their more predictable predecessors.
Cancer and Blood Disorders in Childhood: Biopsychosocial-Developmental Issues in Assessment and Treatment
Authors: Armstrong F. Daniel
Published: November 2020

Cancer, sickle cell disease (SCD), hemophilia, and other blood-related and immunologic disorders represent some of the most complex medical conditions of childhood. All involve a diagnosis that is directly associated with a genetic risk that is interpreted within a complex family system. All have complex biology involving multiple organ systems, and all are potentially fatal. All involve treatment that is demanding, both biologically and behaviorally. All inevitably alter the normal course of development, often during critical periods in the lives of children and families. All have potential significant economic and social consequences that include costs of treatment, indirect costs associated with disease management, and potential long-term costs associated with disability. All have potential long-term effects of treatment that may involve additional new diseases or disabilities. Surprisingly, however, hematologic and oncologic diseases of childhood have one other commonality; despite the complexity and high potential for devastating biologic, psychosocial, family, and economic consequences, all have affected individuals and families who do not experience these devastating consequences and in fact demonstrate a biologic and psychologic resiliency that defies conventional wisdom. Understanding the complex interactions among genetic risk; biology of disease; effectiveness and outcome of treatment; child and family coping, adjustment, and resilience; developmental trajectories; and community support is the challenge for investigators and clinicians during this century, particularly as basic advances in diagnosis and treatment result in anticipation of probable survival for the vast majority of children with these conditions. It is for this reason that these diseases of childhood are frequently considered from a biopsychosocial perspective (Engel, 1980), although we argue that this term must be expanded to incorporate developmental complexity, particularly when applied to children. Since Engel (1980) first proposed a biopsychosocial model of illness as a conceptual model for understanding and treating functional gastrointestinal disorders, our understanding of chronic illness has increasingly incorporated this perspective. The biopsychosocial model recognizes that illness, and one’s experience of illness, occurs through a dynamic interaction among biologic, psychologic, social, and environmental factors, all of which overlap as potential causes and maintenance factors of symptoms associated with the illness.
Stress and Coping in the Pediatric Cancer Experience
Authors: Kupst Mary Jo , Bingen Kristin
Published: November 2020

The diagnosis of pediatric cancer is one of the most stressful situations a child and family must face. It presents an overwhelming series of stressors, not the least of which is the possibility of the child’s death. Although the survival rate for childhood cancer has improved significantly (from nearly always fatal in the 1950s and 1960s to nearly 75% survival at present), the treatments remain lengthy and intensive, involving fundamental changes in the child and family’s lives. The chapters that follow in this book present a thorough discussion of the various psychological issues in pediatric hematology/oncology. This chapter begins with an overview of what is meant by coping and then focuses on three main questions: (a) What is the impact of pediatric cancer? That is, with what must children and families cope? (b) How do they cope? And, finally, (c) how is coping related to positive adaptation? We also discuss the theoretical and methodological issues involved in studying coping and adaptation. As there is a subsequent chapter related to families in this volume, we focus primarily on the child, adolescent, and young adult with cancer. Coping is a process that must always be considered in a situational context because it may vary across situations and over time (Compas, Worsham, &Ey, 1992; Fields & Prinz, 1997). It follows that taking a longitudinal approach toward understanding the stressors and demands placed on a child and family as they progress through the experience of cancer is essential. Despite this clinical knowledge and seemingly universal acknowledgment of the process nature of coping, most studies have assessed coping with pediatric cancer at a single point or phase (Compas et al., 1992), and it has often been necessary to extrapolate assumptions about the process by combining results from separate studies. We present a picture of the coping tasks that children and their families face from diagnosis through and beyond treatment. In general, the descriptions of the “natural history” of adaptation (Natterson & Knudson, 1960) from early studies (Binger et al., 1969; Chodoff, Friedman, & Hamburg, 1964; Futterman & Hoffman, 1973) remain useful, although the type and duration of treatment as well as prognostic factors may have changed.
Peer, Friendship Issues, and Emotional Well-Being
Authors: Fuemmeler Bernard F. , Mullins Larry L.
Published: November 2020

The assertion that social relationships contribute to a child’s psychological adjustment, health, and overall well-being is commonly accepted and supported by numerous investigations in the clinical child literature (Erdley, Nangle, Newman, & Carpenter, 2001). A wide variety of social phenomena have been examined, including the association between social and emotional adjustment, social network structure, how children are perceived and accepted by their peer group, and children’s ability to establish friendships and close relationships. Given the importance of peer relationships to emotional well-being, it is surprising that this subject has not received greater attention in the pediatric psycho-oncology literature. Understanding children’s social relationships in the context of cancer is important for four primary reasons. First, many aspects related to having cancer and undergoing treatment for cancer, such as school absence, fatigue, interruptions in play and daily activities, changes in physical appearance, strict medical regimens and their associated adverse side effects, and neurocognitive impairments can increase children’s risk for social adjustment problems. Second, positive peer relationships and social support may facilitate the adjustment of children to the experience of cancer. Third, although understudied in the pediatric literature, having positive social support from peers and friends could potentially influence the course of cancer by enhancing the functioning of the neuroendocrine and immune systems. Finally, with a broader understanding of the relevance of social relationships among children with cancer, targeted interventions can be developed and evaluated for their role on outcomes related to adjustment, quality of life, and mediating mechanisms influencing mortality and morbidity. This chapter provides a general overview of the literature related to the role that peers and friendships have on adjustment and presents a review of the relationship of social support to adjustment and health outcomes. The impact of cancer on peer relationships and friendships also is discussed. The chapter concludes with a presentation of extant literature on interventions that have been developed to promote social adjustment and a discussion of future directions. To begin, a description is provided of the terminology and how social processes are often conceptualized. Such information is presented as a heuristic for future research in pediatric psycho-oncology.
Spirituality and Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Authors: Myers Cynthia D. , Stuber Margaret L.
Published: November 2020

The use of complementary and alternative medicine by children with cancer appears to be common, with 31% to 84% of pediatric oncology samples reportedly using at least one complementary or alternative therapy according to surveys conducted in several regions of the world, including North America (Fernandez et al., 1998; T. Friedman et al., 1997; Kelly et al., 2000; Neuhouser et al., 2001); Australia (Sawyer et al., 1994); the Netherlands (Grootenhuis et al., 1998); Finland (Mottonen & Uhari, 1997); and Taiwan (Yeh et al., 2000). This chapter reviews the medical literature regarding complementary and alternative medicine in relation to pediatric oncology. To begin, the issue of defining complementary and alternative medicine is addressed. Studies of complementary and alternative medicine use by the general adult population and by adults with cancer as well as by pediatric oncology samples are described to highlight issues concerning definitions of complementary and alternative medicine and to ascertain the prevalence of use of specific complementary and alternative medicine modalities. Available reports of clinical trials testing complementary and alternative medicine modalities in the context of pediatric cancer are summarized. Finally, a discussion is provided on spirituality and religion in relation to complementary and alternative medicine and the challenges faced by children with cancer and their families. Complementary and alternative medicine was described by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) at the National Institutes of Health as “a group of diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not presently considered to be part of conventional medicine.” The NCCAM indicated that the term complementary therapy refers to therapies used in conjunction with conventional medicine; alternative therapies are those that are used in place of conventional medicine, for which conventional medicine is defined as medicine as practiced by holders of medical doctor (M.D.) or doctor of osteopathy (D.O.) degrees and other health professionals, including physical therapists, psychologists, and registered nurses. According to the NCCAM, additional terms for conventional medicine include allopathy, Western, mainstream, orthodox, regular medicine, and biomedicine; additional terms for complementary and alternative medicine include unconventional, nonconventional, and unproven medicine.
Problem-Solving Skills Training for Mothers of Children With Newly Diagnosed Cancer
Authors: Copeland Donna R. , Noll Robert B.
Published: November 2020

The diagnosis of childhood cancer is a highly stressful event for all members of the family. This chapter focuses on the responses of mothers during the first few months after the diagnosis and describes an 8-week intervention, entitled problemsolving skills training (PSST), that is efficacious in reducing features of negative affectivity in mothers during the time of induction and early treatment. Studies examining the emotional well-being of parents of children with cancer suggested that mothers and fathers are at risk for symptoms of anxiety and depression during their child’s treatment (Fife, Norton, & Groom, 1987; Hughes & Lieberman, 1990; Noll et al., 1995). In addition, some evidence suggested that mothers are at increased risk for posttraumatic stress symptoms after treatment ends (Hall & Baum, 1995; Kazak et al., 1997; Manne, DuHamel, Gallelli, Sorgen, & Redd, 1998; Manne et al., 2001, 2002; Pelcovitz et al.,1996; Stuber, Christakis, Houskamp, & Kazak, 1996). These findings are not universal. Some researchers have reported a return to normal psychological functioning among parents within months after their child was diagnosed (Dahlquist, Czyzewski, & Jones, 1996; Kupst & Schulman, 1988; Kupst et al., 1995). Regardless, consensus exists that there is a period of time immediately after a child is diagnosed with cancer when caregivers are at risk for an increase in symptoms of depression and anxiety (Kazak et al., 2001). In addition to the specific stressors associated with a new diagnosis of cancer in her child, the wife/mother appears to be the key individual in maintaining the integrity of the entire family. For example, 74% of men reported that they talk primarily to their spouse when upset (Cutrona, 1996). Further, males will typically depend on their wives to maintain social contacts with friends, family, and the general community (Antonucci & Akiyama, 1987). Thus, mothers may be particularly vulnerable to distress because of the pivotal role they play in maintaining family social and emotional functioning. The experience of a cancer diagnosis can be easily understood as a major negative life stressor that can cause significant psychological distress.
The Great Circle
Authors: Thomson Peter
Published: November 2020

The Port of San Francisco, once one of the world’s most celebrated ports of call, has been reduced to this: a quarter-mile of bare, worn asphalt between a chain link fence and the bay, a couple dozen oblong cargo containers stacked like a set of playroom blocks, and one huge gray cargo crane that looms over the water like the skeleton of some Stanford student’s monstrous robotic dog. A few miles to the north, the Embarcadero and its ripsaw ridge of angled piers, once the pulsing heart of the city’s commercial port, is today a palm-tree-lined recreational waterfront of restaurants, bars, condos, and t-shirt vendors, while here to the south of downtown, huge swaths of abandoned waterfront lie fallow, awaiting the next wave of redevelopment. The San Francisco Bay itself remains a major Pacific port, but virtually all of its cargo traffic now moves through the modern container terminals of Oakland, across the bay. In the city of San Francisco itself, there remains only a single active cargo pier, and this is it. Pier 80. Lashed to the far side of the sea of asphalt is a ship, of modest size by contemporary standards but its sheer bulk impressive nonetheless—a hulking mass of emerald green steel looming three stories above the tarmac, a pale yellow superstructure rising eight stories above that in the stern, and a wall of red and blue containers stacked six high above the forward decks. The ship looks awkward and ungainly. It looks like it may well challenge the principles of buoyancy and displacement. It looks like nothing that neither James nor I have ever trusted his life to before. Our hallucinatory float down the Copper River is ten days behind us. We’ve reentered civilization in Anchorage, visited friends in Seattle, finally met Gary Cook of Baikal Watch and our Russia-specialist travel agent Debbie, and made other last-minute arrangements here in San Francisco, and now we’re riding across the acres of asphalt in the back of a battered yellow van and our friend Eleanor, who drove us down here, is repeating, as if a mantra, Oh my god, I can’t believe you’re getting on this thing. . . . Oh my god, I can’t believe . . .
Social Science in Brown’s Path: Social Contact and Integration Revisited,
Authors: Minow Martha
Published: November 2020

The architects of Brown v. Board of Education soldiered through long struggles and many obstacles, but even they would probably be surprised by the state of affairs emerging half a century following the decision. Brown influenced expanding use of social sciences by lawyers pursuing social change and especially educational reforms. The state of racial integration in education might be stunningly disappointing, but Brown has also produced unexpected dividends addressing historic educational disadvantages based on gender, disability, language, immigrant status, poverty, sexual orientation, and religion. This dual legacy of disappointment and promise raises profound questions about the priority the nation gives not just to equal opportunity but also to social integration, the movement of individuals from previously excluded or subordinated groups into the social mainstream where they can join others in pursuing opportunities and enriching society. Because this aspiration gained support from social science evidence in the Brown litigation itself, this chapter considers the strengths and limitations of social science research on social integration, including research launched in the wake of the Brown litigation. The boost Brown gave to the field of social psychology to advance racial equality has some irony, given the reliance by defenders of racial segregation on eugenics and other “scientific” theories of their day. The contribution of social psychology to the cause of racial justice is particularly contested, as many critics have contended that its use contributed to narrowing policy debates to a focus on psychological damage rather than structures of racial oppression and the role of community supports in academic success. It might even be fair to conclude that when it comes to racial relations in the United States, there is more success in the growth of the research field studying social integration than there is success in actual social integration. Hence, paying attention to contemporary social science in assessing how social integration affects academic achievement, social cohesion, individual development, economic and social opportunities, and civic engagement and democracy means remaining mindful of the limitations of research and continuing to subject its assumptions to scrutiny.
Conclusion
Authors: Bell Derrick
Published: November 2020

Booker T. Washington was hailed by whites and despised by many blacks for his accommodationist policies on race as reflected in his 1895 “Atlanta Compromise” speech, urging blacks to concede disenfranchisement and segregation in order to gain white support for progress in business and education.1 Whatever Washington’s intentions, the surrender of basic citizenship rights in the hope that hostile whites would reciprocate with schooling and better jobs, deserved the condemnation it received from black leaders, particularly W. E. B. Du Bois. Even so, in his speech, Washington used a parable to convey his philosophy of Negro self-sufficiency that has contemporary significance. A lost ship has sailed for many days before finally sighting a friendly vessel. Frantically, the lost ship’s crew signal their need for water, for they are dying of thirst. The rescue boat signals back: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The crew does so and brings them up filled with the fresh water of the Amazon River into which they have unknowingly sailed. Whatever the wisdom of Washington’s advice to a people whose dire physical plight was the result, not of storms abroad, but of an overwhelming racial hostility at home, the admonition “Cast down your buckets where you are” can be a solution if not the salvation for those working to reform and revitalize the ongoing crusade to overcome the debilitating effects of racism. To benefit from this resource in our midst, blacks must supplement the forms and patterns of striving for racial equality with innovative forms of personal self-image, group organization, resource collection and distribution, and strategic planning, using the concept of racial fortuity as a guideline. Such efforts are underway in countless areas across the country. They go forward in the face of a racial history in America that raises the question whether unacknowledged forces—stronger than the authority of the Civil War amendments and the civil rights statutes of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—will dilute the protection from discrimination people of color can expect from laws and policies nominally intended for this purpose.
Investigative Reporting
Authors: Regalad Antonio
Published: November 2020

When a biotechnology executive whose company I had often written about published a memoir, I got a chance to learn how he saw journalists—in particular, me. The executive, Michael West of Advanced Cell Technology Inc., in Worcester, Massachusetts, blamed me for some disastrous publicity that had befallen his small cloning company. On page 193 of his book, The Immortal Cell (2003), he let me have it: “Antonio Regalado is more of a detective than a reporter” (emphasis added). I think Dr. West was honestly surprised by the lengths to which I had gone to find out about his company's research. ACT was at that time pioneering a controversial technology called “therapeutic cloning.” I had gone to the patent office and delved through voluminous files. I had called just about everyone who'd ever worked with the company. I'd asked impertinent questions. I wouldn't take no for an answer. Although Dr. West's book portrays me as a somewhat dastardly fellow, being called a “detective” is one of the biggest compliments I've ever been paid. What's more, I learned from his comment that the approach to reporting I had taken was very different from that of other science journalists he'd dealt with. The fact is most science journalists are concerned with explaining science to a general audience. Reporters take difficult material and present it in a way that lay readers can understand. With so much of modern life based on science, explaining it clearly is probably our community's most important objective. But sometimes we science reporters can get a little complacent. We can be too trusting of scientists' good intentions, and we forget to be skeptical. Too often, we allow Science, Nature, and the Journal of the American Medical Association to spoon-feed us the news each week. Seth Shulman, a reporter who has covered toxic waste and government censorship of science, told me that his definition of an investigative project is “a story that doesn't want to be told.” That's why leaked reports or confidential memos so often play a role in investigative reports. Sometimes a physical paper trail is the only way to find out what people were really thinking. To be a science “detective” requires a more critical view of things.
Institutional Communications During Crisis
Authors: Rodgers Joann Ellison
Published: November 2020

Shortly after I left daily newspapering in 1984 for a post in Johns Hopkins Medicine's public affairs office, I was called to a meeting of senior administrators at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The assignment was to decide what to say publicly—or whether to say anything at all—about an outbreak of deadly meningitis in the newborn nursery, and the need to close it until state and hospital epidemiologists had tracked down and eradicated the source of the infection. The right things were already being done to protect the public and the workforce, to take responsibility for the problem, and to investigate and fix what might have gone wrong. The issue was communications. My still-fresh reporter's instincts led me to propose that Hopkins call a press conference to tell the bad news quickly, before it leaked and the press suspected a coverup. We would publicly advise prospective mothers-to-be that Hopkins would arrange for their deliveries at other institutions. Despite worries that press coverage would hurt our reputation, scare patients and visitors, and invite lawsuits, I got the benefit of the doubt and personally broke the news on camera that same day. Hopkins was rewarded with a newspaper editorial praising us for putting patient safety first, a bolstered reputation for credibility, and a sure bet for increased referrals and revenue. Not a bad outcome, although not a great one, either. I might have asked that a physician or nurse deliver the news, putting a bona fide expert's face on the story. (The press corps wasn't exactly thrilled with my “credentials.”) I could have made sure insiders got a “heads-up” advance notice before they saw my face on the 6 p.m. news. (They grumbled—appropriately—about having been blind-sided and ill-equipped to answer follow-up questions from patients, families, and journalists.) And I should have alerted public information officers (PIOs) in the state health department that they would surely get calls from the press as well and should be prepared to respond quickly. Still, 20 years later, the option of whether to communicate or not communicate during a crisis remains widely recognized as no option at all.
“Resist the Earthquake and Rescue Ourselves”: The Reconstruction of Tangshan after the 1976 Earthquake
Authors: Chen Beatrice
Published: November 2020

At 8:02 a.m. on the morning of July 28, 1976, approximately five hours after an earthquake struck Tangshan in northeastern China, a MIG-8 fighter jet landed at the People’s Liberation Army base nine kilometers from the sprawling industrial city of Tangshan. Two army officers quickly ran toward the plane and an officer named Lee asked, “What is the flight’s mission?” The pilot replied, “We are looking for the epicenter of the earthquake.” Without checking the identity or credentials of the other passengers, Lee anxiously asked the pilot to fly over Tangshan and confirm his suspicion that the epicenter lay under the city. As Lee watched the plane fly toward Tangshan, he radioed the pilot, “Can you see Tangshan yet?” Through the speakers came the pilot’s shaky voice, “Yes, where it used to be!” When the earthquake shook Tangshan out of its slumber in the early hours of that summer morning, nobody imagined that it would turn the city into a vast ruin. Not a single structure in this city of thirtythree square kilometers escaped unharmed from this earthquake, which registered 7.8 on the Richter scale. Fully 78 percent of Tangshan’s industrial buildings and 97 percent of its residential buildings were leveled. The enormity of the physical destruction could only mean a comparable scale of human calamity. The official death toll stands at 240,000, but outside sources have posted much higher figures. Some current residents still believe that the death toll is at least twice that of the official tally. One third-generation Tangshan resident pointed out, “Not one single building escaped earthquake damage. How can the government officials say that only one quarter of the Tangshan population perished in this disaster?” To this day, the true death toll remains a haunting unknown. What is certain is that within three seconds on July 28, 1976, Tangshan was obliterated from the earth by a natural force roughly 400 times that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is conceivable that if the earthquake had not been detected by a number of seismological centers around the globe, the news of this great catastrophe would never have reached the outside world.
A Vital Void: Reconstructions of Downtown Beirut
Authors: Sarkis Hashim
Published: November 2020

A few lines before the end of The Tiller of Waters, the protagonist, Nicholas Mitri, wakes up after his death in a void. Once he orients himself, he realizes that this void is actually the center of Beirut that he has inhabited alone during the 1975–1990 civil war and that he has been desperately trying to narrate and preserve throughout the novel. Mitri, a Greek Orthodox man from the predominantly Muslim West Beirut, had been forced out of his house by Shiite Muslim refugees from South Lebanon who had, in turn, been displaced by an Israeli invasion. Homeless, he drifts to his father’s textile shop in downtown Beirut, the contested battle zone between Christian East and Muslim West Beirut. There, he lives alone like Robinson Crusoe in the wilderness of the city center and recounts his family’s story and the history of the different peoples and religious groups that inhabited his life and the prewar city. The house where he lived with his Greek Alexandrian parents and with the Kurdish maid he loved, the shop owned by a Sunni Muslim next to his father’s in the bazaar of downtown Beirut, and the parlor where his mother was trained by an Armenian piano teacher are all eventually wiped out—not by the war but by the reconstruction project. The void, at the end of the story, represents the futility of his efforts to preserve the places. The buildings and streets, it turns out, are more fragile than the memories that inhabit them. The civil war that entrapped Mitri was triggered in 1975 by disagreements between Lebanon’s Christians and Muslims over the presence and power of the Palestinian militias in Lebanon. The war would briefly stop in 1977, with the intervention of Arab forces led by Syria, only to be resumed again, this time with the participation of the Syrians on the side of the Palestinians and Muslims. When the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982 to support the Christians and expel the Palestinians, the war took on an international scope with a failed American and European military intervention.
After the Unrest: Ten Years of Rebuilding Los Angeles following the Trauma of 1992
Authors: Fulton William
Published: November 2020

It is always difficult to measure urban resilience, but never more so when the trauma results from civil unrest, as opposed to a natural disaster or enemy attack.With natural disasters, it is frequently difficult to place blame, even if “acts of God” are sometimes all too intertwined with ill-advised decisions to site buildings in vulnerable areas. Wars and other attacks usually entail clear enemies, and eventually come to some negotiated halt, accompanied by greater territorial clarity. With riots and civil unrest, by contrast, destruction is community-based. Victims and perpetrators live in close proximity; violence is often inflicted within the very neighborhoods that feel most aggrieved; and recovery entails the need to redress not just physical damage but also deeply ingrained mistrust. Rebuilding, in this sense, requires not just investment in real estate, but also a variety of human capital—local infusions of community dynamism, neighborly cooperation, and no small measure of hope. In the United States, Los Angeles, California, stands out as the site of two generations of civil unrest: the Watts riots of 1965 and the civil unrest of 1992. The 1992 disturbance was the most damaging urban riot in American history, killing fifty-four people and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. Touched off by the acquittal on April 29 of white police officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King, the rampage lasted several days and spread to an area much larger than the earlier riots in Watts. The disturbance ranged across dozens of square miles, mostly along the lengthy commercial strips in the southern part of the city of Los Angeles, including many areas not traditionally viewed as part of South Central. It even spilled northward above the Santa Monica Freeway into Hollywood, the traditionally Jewish Fairfax district, and other neighborhoods far from the traditional centers of African-American residence. This chapter investigates a full decade of efforts to rebuild South Central Los Angeles, following the trial of King’s assailants. In so many ways, Los Angeles is a city like no other—a vast but low-rise city, dense and sprawling at the same time. Auto-oriented and generally without high-rises, Los Angeles might seem different from a more traditional metropolis such as New York.
Ground States, Energy Landscape, and Low-Temperature Dynamics of ± J Spin Glasses
Authors: Kobe Sigismund , Krawczyk Jarek
Published: November 2020

The previous three chapters have focused on the analysis of computational problems using methods from statistical physics. This chapter largely takes the reverse approach. We turn to a problem from the physics literature, the spin glass, and use the branch-and-bound method from combinatorial optimization to analyze its energy landscape. The spin glass model is a prototype that combines questions of computational complexity from the mathematical point of view and of glassy behavior from the physical one. In general, the problem of finding the ground state, or minimal energy configuration, of such model systems belongs to the class of NP-hard tasks. The spin glass is defined using the language of the Ising model, the fundamental description of magnetism at the level of statistical mechanics. The Ising model contains a set of n spins, or binary variables si, each of which can take on the value up (si = 1) or down (si= 1).
Scalability, Random Surfaces, and Synchronized Computing Networks
Authors: Toroczkai Zoltan , Korniss György
Published: November 2020

In most cases, it is impossible to describe and understand complex system dynamics via analytical methods. The density of problems that are rigorously solvable with analytic tools is vanishingly small in the set of all problems, and often the only way one can reliably obtain a system-level understanding of such problems is through direct simulation. This chapter broadens the discussion on the relationship between complexity and statistical physics by exploring how the computational scalability of parallelized simulation can be analyzed using a physical model of surface growth. Specifically, the systems considered here are made up of a large number of interacting individual elements with a finite number of attributes, or local state variables, each assuming a countable number (typically finite) of values. The dynamics of the local state variables are discrete events occurring in continuous time. Between two consecutive updates, the local variables stay unchanged. Another important assumption we make is that the interactions in the underlying system to be simulated have finite range. Examples of such systems include: magnetic systems (spin states and spin flip dynamics); surface growth via molecular beam epitaxy (height of the surface, molecular deposition, and diffusion dynamics); epidemiology (health of an individual, the dynamics of infection and recovery); financial markets (wealth state, buy/sell dynamics); and wireless communications or queueing systems (number of jobs, job arrival dynamics). Often—as in the case we study here—the dynamics of such systems are inherently stochastic and asynchronous. The simulation of such systems is nontrivial, and in most cases the complexity of the problem requires simulations on distributed architectures, defining the field of parallel discrete-event simulations (PDES) [186, 367, 416]. Conceptually, the computational task is divided among n processing elements (PEs), where each processor evolves the dynamics of the allocated piece. Due to the interactions among the individual elements of the simulated system (spins, atoms, packets, calls, etc.) the PEs must coordinate with a subset of other PEs during the simulation. For example, the state of a spin can only be updated if the state of the neighbors is known. However, some neighbors might belong to the computational domain of another PE, thus, message passing will be required in order to preserve causality.
Introduction to Chemical Kinetic Processes
Authors: Ross John , Schreiber Igor , Vlad Marcel O.
Published: November 2020

It is useful to have a brief discussion of some kinetic processes that we shall treat in later chapters. Some, but not all, of the material in this chapter is presented in [1] in more detail. A macroscopic, deterministic chemical reacting system consists of a number of different species, each with a given concentration (molecules or moles per unit volume). The word “macroscopic” implies that the concentrations are of the order of Avogadro’s number (about 6.02 × 1023) per liter. The concentrations are constant at a given instant, that is, thermal fluctuations away from the average concentration are negligibly small (more in section 2.3). The kinetics in many cases, but far from all, obeys mass action rate expressions of the type . . . dA/dt = k(T )AαBβ . . . (2.1) . . . where T is temperature, A is the concentration of species A, the same for B, and possibly other species indicated by dots in the equation, and α and β are empirically determined “orders” of reaction. The rate coefficient k is generally a function of temperature and frequently a function of T only. The dependence of k on T is given empirically by the Arrhenius equation . . . k(T ) = C exp−Ea/RT (2.2) . . . where C, the frequency factor, is either nearly constant or a weakly dependent function of temperature, and Ea is the activation energy. Rate coefficients are averages of reaction cross-sections, as measured for example by molecular beam experiments. The a priori calculation of cross-sections from quantum mechanical fundamentals is extraordinarily difficult and has been done to good accuracy only for the simplest trimolecular systems (such as D + H2). A widely used alternative approach is based on activated complex theory. In its simplest form, two reactants collide and form an activated complex, said to be in equilibrium. One degree of freedom of the complex, a vibration, is allowed to lead to the dissociation of the complex to products, and the rate of that dissociation is taken to be the rate of the reaction.
Response of Systems to Pulse Perturbations
Authors: Ross John , Schreiber Igor , Vlad Marcel O.
Published: November 2020

Consider a chemical reaction system with many chemical species; it may be in a transient state but it is easier to think of it in a stable stationary state, not necessarily but usually away from equilibrium. We wish to probe the responses of the concentrations of the chemical species to a pulse perturbation of one of the chemical species. The pulse need not be small; it can be of arbitrary magnitude. This is analogous to providing a given input to one variable of an electronic system and measuring the outputs of the other variables. The method presented in this chapter gives causal connectivities of one reacting species with another as well as regulatory features of a reaction network. Much more will be said about the responses of chemical and other systems to pulses and other perturbations in chapter 12. The effects of small perturbations on reacting systems have been investigated in a number of studies, to which we return in chapters 9 and 13. Let us begin simply: Consider a series of first-order reactions as in fig. 5.1, which shows an unbranched chain of reversible reactions. We shall not be restricted to first-order reactions but can learn a lot from this example. Let there be an influx of k0 molecules of X1 and an outflow of k8 molecules of X8 per unit time. We assume that the reaction proceeds from left to right and hence the Gibbs free energy change for each step and for the overall reaction in that direction is negative. The mass action law for the kinetic equations, say that of X2, is . . . dX2/dt = k1X1 + k−2X3 − (k−1 + k2) X2 (5.1) . . . If all the time derivatives of the concentrations are zero, then the system is in a stationary state. Suppose we perturb that stationary state with an increase in X1 by an arbitrary amount and solve the kinetic equations numerically for the variations of the concentrations as a function of time, as the system returns to the stationary state. A plot of such a relaxation is shown in fig. 5.2.
Lifetime and Transit Time Distributions and Response Experiments in Chemical Kinetics
Authors: Ross John , Schreiber Igor , Vlad Marcel O.
Published: November 2020

We discussed some aspects of the responses of chemical systems, linear or nonlinear, to perturbations on several earlier occasions. The first was the responses of the chemical species in a reaction mechanism (a network) in a nonequilibrium stable stationary state to a pulse in concentration of one species. We referred to this approach as the “pulse method” (see chapter 5 for theory and chapter 6 for experiments). Second, we studied the time series of the responses of concentrations to repeated random perturbations, the formulation of correlation functions from such measurements, and the construction of the correlation metric (see chapter 7 for theory and chapter 8 for experiments). Third, in the investigation of oscillatory chemical reactions we showed that the responses of a chemical system in a stable stationary state close to a Hopf bifurcation are related to the category of the oscillatory reaction and to the role of the essential species in the system (see chapter 11 for theory and experiments). In each of these cases the responses yield important information about the reaction pathway and the reaction mechanism. In this chapter we focus on the design of simple types of response experiments that make it possible to extract mechanistic and kinetic information from complex nonlinear reaction systems. The main idea is to use “neutral” labeled compounds (tracers), which have the same kinetic and transport properties as the unlabeled compounds. In our previous work we have shown that by using neutral tracers a class of response experiments can be described by linear response laws, even though the underlying kinetic equations are highly nonlinear. The linear response is not the result of a linearization procedure, but it is due to the use of neutral tracers. As a result the response is linear even for large perturbations, making it possible to investigate global nonlinear kinetics by making use of linear mathematical techniques. Moreover, the susceptibility functions from the response law are related to the probability densities of the lifetimes and transit times of the various chemical species, making it easy to establish a connection between the response data and the mechanism and kinetics of the process.
Impacts and Reverberations
Authors: Hough Susan Elizabeth , Bilham Roger G.
Published: November 2020

Earthquakes and their attendant phenomena rank among the most terrifying natural disasters faced by mankind. Out of a clear blue sky—or worse, a jet-black one—comes shaking strong enough to hurl furniture across the room, human bodies out of bed, and entire houses off their foundations. Individuals who experience the full brunt of the planet’s strongest convulsions often later describe the single thought that echoed in their minds during the tumult: I am going to die. When the dust settles, the immediate aftermath of an earthquake in an urbanized society can be profound. Phone service and water supplies can be disrupted for days, fires can erupt, and even a small number of overpass collapses can impede rescue operations and snarl traffic for months. On an increasingly urban planet, millions of people have positioned themselves directly in harm’s way. Global settlement patterns have in all too many cases resulted in enormous concentrations of humanity in some of the planet’s most dangerous earthquake zones. On the holiday Sunday morning of December 26, 2004, citizens and tourists in countries around the rim of the Indian Ocean were at work and at play when an enormous M9 (magnitude 9.0) earthquake suddenly unleashed a torrent of water several times larger than the volume of the Great Salt Lake. The world then watched with horror as events unfolded: a death toll that climbed toward 300,000 that was accompanied by unimaginable, and seemingly insurmountable, devastation to hundreds of towns and cities. For scientists involved with earthquake hazards research in that part of the world, the images were doubly wrenching: the hazard from large global earthquakes has been recognized for decades. Located mostly offshore, the 2004 Sumatra quake unleashed its destructive fury primarily in the sea. The next great earthquake to affect Asia might well be inland, perhaps along the Himalayan front or in central China.