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Extracts of the opium poppy have been used for the relief of pain since antiquity. The active principle, morphine, continues to this day to be one of the most effective ways of alleviating moderate and severe pain. It is also one of the most addicting drugs known to man. This chapter describes the history of research on opium and the pharmacologic properties of morphine and related drugs. It briefly summarizes critical studies in the development of current knowledge of their antinociceptive actions; their effects on arousal, respiration, locomotor activity, and behavioral reinforcement; endocrine effects; and actions on peripheral tissues including the gastrointestinal tract, the genital tract, and the heart and circulatory system. The last section provides an overview of the absorption, metabolism, and distribution of morphine and other major opiate drugs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From an acoustical point of view, bone is a complex medium as it is heterogeneous, anisotropic and viscoelastic. This chapter reviews the basic notions of physical acoustics which are necessary to tackle the problem of the ultrasonic propagation in bone, in the perspective of the application of quantitative ultrasound (QUS) techniques to bone characterization. The first section introduces the basic phenomena related to the field of medical ultrasound. Basic description of wave propagation is introduced. Mechanical bases are necessary to understand the elastodynamic nature of the interaction between bone and ultrasound. The physical determinants of the speed of sound of the different types of waves corresponding to the propagation in a liquid and in a solid are considered. The effects of boundary conditions (guided waves) are also detailed. The second section describes the physical interaction between an ultrasonic wave and bone tissue, by introducing reflection/refraction, attenuation and scattering phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satellite-based atmospheric remote sensing aims at deriving the properties of trace gases, aerosols and clouds, as well as surface parameters from the measured top-of-atmosphere spectral radiance and reflectance. This requires, besides high quality spectra, an accurate modelling of the radiative transfer of solar radiation through the atmosphere to the sensor (forward model) and methods to derive the constituent properties from the measured top-of-atmosphere spectra (inversion methods). Many trace gases have structured absorption spectra in the UV-VIS spectral range serving as the starting point for determining their abundance by applying Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (DOAS) or similar methods. In the UV-VIS-NIR and SWIR spectral regions the solar radiation is strongly scattered by clouds and aerosols. Therefore the presence of clouds and aerosol particles and their properties can also be inferred from the outgoing radiance measured by space-based instruments. Contrary to the forward model, the inversion methods allow to derive characteristics of the atmospheric state based on the measured quantities. A common product of the inversion of satellite measurements in limb, nadir or occultation geometry are total columns or height-resolved profiles of trace gas concentrations and aerosol parameters. Retrieving trace gas amounts in the troposphere constitutes a specific challenge. SCIAMACHY΄s unique limb/nadir matching capability provides access to tropospheric columns by combining total columns obtained from nadir geometry with simultaneously measured stratospheric columns obtained from limb geometry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caffeine, theophylline, theobromine, and paraxanthine administered to animals and humans distribute in all body fluids and cross all biological membranes. They do not accumulate in organs or tissues and are extensively metabolized by the liver, with less than 2% of caffeine administered excreted unchanged in human urine. Dose-independent and dose-dependent pharmacokinetics of caffeine and other dimethylxanthines may be observed and explained by saturation of metabolic pathways and impaired elimination due to the immaturity of hepatic enzyme and liver diseases. While gender and menstrual cycle have little effect on their elimination, decreased clearance is seen in women using oral contraceptives and during pregnancy. Obesity, physical exercise, diseases, and particularly smoking and the interactions of drugs affect their elimination owing to either stimulation or inhibition of CYP1A2. Their metabolic pathways exhibit important quantitative and qualitative differences in animal species and man. Chronic ingestion or restriction of caffeine intake in man has a small effect on their disposition, but dietary constituents, including broccoli and herbal tea, as well as alcohol were shown to modify their plasma pharmacokinetics. Using molar ratios of metabolites in plasma and/or urine, phenotyping of various enzyme activities, such as cytochrome monooxygenases, N-acetylation, 8-hydroxylation, and xanthine oxidase, has become a valuable tool to identify polymorphisms and to understand individual variations and potential associations with health risks in epidemiological surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present ellipsometric spectra of a graphene flake placed on a surface of oxidized silicon wafer. Our measurements demonstrate that spectroscopic ellipsometry can be successfully used to count the number of graphene layers in a flake. We also show that visible transparency of any two-dimensional system with a symmetric electronic spectrum is governed by the fine structure constant and derive an expression for the absorption coefficient of such a system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of protein hydrolysates as an important nutrient for growth and maintenance has been increasing in animal nutrition. Although animal proteins and protein hydrolysates are widely used however, recently vegetable protein hydrolysates are gaining importance. This chapter reviews the use of protein hydrolysates developed by enzyme hydrolysis and by solid state fermentation process in animal nutrition especially for piglets and compares it with the standard products such as plasma and fishmeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A drug interaction is a situation in which a drug, food or other extrinsic and intrinsic factors affect the activity of a medication, i.e. the effects of the medication are increased or decreased, or the combination of substances produces a new effect that neither of them produces on its own. Thereby often the efficacy or toxicity of a medication is changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional method to determine moisture absorption relies on a weight gain measurement metrology with an analytical balance. This approach is generally not suitable for thin samples. In this study, the moisture absorption–desorption behavior of a thin BT core was characterized in situ using a sorption TGA over a temperature range of 30–80°C, in an environment of up to 80% relative humidity. From the experimental results, the moisture diffusivity and the saturated moisture content have been determined. Within the experimental temperature range, the diffusivity can be described by the Arrhenius equation and the activation energy can be calculated. The results obtained are compared with literature data. The impact of moisture diffusion in BT core on the reliability of ultrathin stacked chip scale packages (UT SCSP) was discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epoxy molding compounds (EMCs) are widely used as encapsulation materials for protecting the semiconductor chips of plastic encapsulated microcircuits (PEMs) against harsh environments and mechanical forces such as impact and pressure. Since PEMs are usually exposed to humid conditions during their storage and service life, they absorb moisture, which causes many reliability problems such as popcorn cracking and interfacial delamination during the solder reflow process. This chapter presents a comprehensive investigation of the mechanism of moisture diffusion in EMCs. The results from moisture diffusion tests during absorption, desorption, and re-sorption of various EMC samples are presented. The gravimetric results showed a non-Fickian behavior of the moisture diffusion in the EMCs. This non-Fickian behavior was found to induce a non-reversible effect by causing some residual moisture content upon baking these plastic parts. The gravimetric moisture diffusion results can be correlated to moisture-induced hygroscopic swelling and adhesion loss. Hygroscopic swelling of EMC and its reversibility was investigated using both bulk EMC samples and bi-material beams. Moreover, the effect of moisture on the adhesion of EMC/Cu interface was studied using a fracture mechanics approach. Two mechanisms of adhesion loss upon moisture diffusion can be observed. Some of the adhesion loss due to small amount of moisture content may be recovered via a proper annealing. However, upon long-term storage in humid conditions, where the second phase of non-Fickian behavior is activated at the interface, none of the adhesion loss can be recovered after baking the samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is concerned with a mathematical problem derived from the Ellis model used in Fluid Mechanics to describe the response of a great variety of generalized fluid flows. For pseudoplastic fluids, it is well-known that the weak solutions to that problem extinct in a finite time. In order to obtain the same property for Newtonian and dilatant fluids, we modify the problem by introducing an absorption term in the momentum equation. The proof relies on a suitable energy method, Sobolev type interpolation inequalities and also on a generalized Korn΄s inequality. Then we extend our results for several cases: slip boundary conditions, anisotropic absorption and non-homogeneous fluid flows.We also discuss existence and uniqueness of weak solutions for the modified problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the dynamical characteristics of metamaterial systems, such as the temporal coherence gain of superlens, the causality limitation on the ideal cloaking systems, the relaxation process and essential elements in the dispersive cloaking systems, and extending the working frequency range of cloaking systems. The point of our study is the physical dispersive properties of meta-materials, which are well known to be intrinsically strongly dispersive. With physical dispersion, new physical pictures could be obtained for the waves propagating inside metamaterial, such as the ˵group retarded time″ for waves inside superlens and cloak, the causality limitation on real metamaterial systems, and the essential elements for design optimization. So we believe the dynamical study of meta-materials will be an important direction for further research. All theoretical derivations and conclusions are demonstrated by powerful finite-difference time-domain simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sustainable Agriculture is the property of Springer Nature / Books and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper describes a method for measuring extinction coefficients of a microbubble suspension at different probing pulse pressures. The experimental results demonstrated the usefulness of this method for evaluating acoustic properties of microbubbles of ultrasound contrast agents and also for finding the optimum exposure conditions of ultrasound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There was no ‘One, two, three, and away’, but they began running when they liked and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. Of all technological accomplishments, none so epitomizes human skill and ingenuity as the harnessing of electricity. Because so much of modern existence is based on it, electrical energy is inevitably taken for granted. Only occasional power failures are capable of reminding us just how dependent we are on this invisible commodity. The practical use of electricity is a surprisingly recent development. It is hard to believe that many of the scientists who precipitated this revolution, made their discoveries as recently as in the nineteenth century, and frequently wrote up their laboratory notes by candle-light. The great advances in atomic physics, early in the twentieth century, paved the way for a second revolution: solid state electronics. Its impact on society has been enormous, giving rise to new industries, new professions, new communication techniques and new organizations. Both revolutions depended, to an exceptional degree, on progress in fundamental science. The people responsible for this breathtaking series of innovations were primarily concerned with abstract ideas, but their efforts have given society radio, television, the telephone, the computer, new forms of heating, lighting, power and transport, and a host of other developments. Many electrical phenomena are transient in nature, whereas magnetism has the advantage of relative permanence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like harmony in music; there is a dark inscrutable workmanship that reconciles discordant elements, makes them cling together in one society. The products of the glass maker are often aesthetically pleasing, but it would be unfair to claim that glass is intrinsically more attractive than any other type of material. Rather, by its presence in the family of materials, glass extends the range of useful properties and artistic qualities. As has transpired only recently, glass also extends the range of atomic structures in condensed matter, through its unique lack of order. Indeed, it is this atomic-level attribute, rather than the traditional ones of transparency and brittleness, which is now acknowledged as the defining characteristic of this type of material. Oxide glasses such as the common silicate varieties have been in use for at least 4000 years. Glass beads, dating from about 2500 BC, have been found in Egypt and other parts of the Near East, although exploitation of the plasticity of hot glass is more recent. These oxide materials so dominated the scene that the existence of the glassy state was believed to be intimately connected with the presence of covalent bonds. Glass has long been known to be a supercooled liquid, and covalent bonding was regarded as a prerequisite if crystallization was to be avoided. These attitudes underwent radical revision in the 1960s. With the production of metallic examples, it was suddenly realized that a glass need not be transparent, brittle, or insulating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All nature is but art unknown to thee, All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good; And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. The bonding between atoms is governed by the structure of the atoms themselves, and because all atoms of a given element are identical, we might expect the atomic arrangement in a crystal to be regular. Crystals, and indeed solids in general, were believed to be perfect for many years after the atomic structure of matter had become generally accepted. There are now so many common phenomena whose very existence is the result of a lack of perfection that it seems surprising that the concept of crystal defects developed only recently. The idea emerged in several different guises, and there was an important precursor which, although not specifically related to crystals, played a major role in heralding the new era. The first person to delve into the realm of imperfection was Alan Griffith, in 1920, following studies of the strengths of glass rods and fibres. He found that when the diameter decreases to about 10 μm, the strength of a fibre becomes markedly higher than that of a relatively thick rod. Assuming that such thin fibres must be free of the flaws that plague thicker specimens, Griffith analyzed the energy balance at idealized cracks and its dependence on applied stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A brief review is given on the electronic and optical properties of carbon nanotubes with emphasis on Aharonov-Bohm effects. The topics include an effective-mass description of the electronic states, optical absorption and excitons, their fine structure, optical absorption for perpendicular polarization, and optical phonons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is part of Subvolume C 'Renewable Energy' of Volume 3 'Energy Technologies' of Landolt-Börnstein Group VIII 'Advanced Materials and Technologies'. It contains: 9 Heat pumps 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Historical development 9.3 Basic principles 9.4 Heat pump technology 9.5 Heat sources 9.6 Heat pump working fluids 9.6.1 HFC-mixtures 9.6.2 Natural working fluids 9.7 Heat pumps in residential and commercial buildings 9.7.1 Heating-only heat pumps 9.7.2 Heating and cooling heat pumps 9.7.3 Heat pump water heater 9.8 Heat pumps in industry 9.8.1 Closed cycle compression heat pumps 9.8.2 Mechanical vapor recompression systems 9.8.3 Thermal vapor recompression (TVR) systems 9.8.4 Absorption heat pumps 9.8.5 Heat transformers 9.9 Energy-efficiency and environmental aspects 9.10 Economical aspects 9.11 Conclusion 9.12 References for 9 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 22 of the book "2005 ASHRAE Handbook—Fundamentals" is presented. It explores the water sorption characteristics of desiccant materials and offers information about the implications of these characteristics in ambient pressure air-conditioning applications. It offers various information on other applications of desiccants.

The article presents an index of the keywords published in the previous issue of the journal "RFID Handbook." Some of them are, Absorption rate, acceleration measurement, access authorisation, access control, access protection page, access register, access rights, acoustomagnetic security system, backscatter modulated backscatter modulator, backscatter system, backscatter transponder, baked enamel, bandwidth, barcode, data block, data carrier, data transfer, data transmission, DBP code, deactivation device, deactivation rate, deactivator, deciphering, decryption.

Chapter 8 of the book "Copper Plate Photogravure: Demystifying the Process" is presented. It presents the three reasons why ferric chloride is used as the mordant in photogravure. It tells about the multiple-bath method as the most common way of etching flat plate photogravures. It informs that the water absorption rate of the gelatin resist is used to control the ferric chloride's penetration and etch.

The risk assessment approach described in this monograph applies only to essential trace elements (ETEs) involved in human health and not to non-essential elements. The monograph is designed to give methods that provide a framework for analysing the boundaries between deficient and excess oral intakes of ETEs. Application of the principles described in this monograph involves a multidisciplinary scientific assessment, using data on required nutritive intakes, deficiency and excess exposure. This monograph focusses on the concepts of the acceptable range of oral intake (AROI). The AROI is designed to limit deficient and excess intakes in healthy populations and is set for different age-sex groups and physiological states such as pregnancy and lactation. To facilitate comparisons, AROIs are discussed in relation to other risk assessment approaches. Homeostatic mechanisms involve regulation of absorption and excretion and tissue retention, which enable adaptation to varying nutrient intakes. These mechanisms provide for an optimal systemic supply for the performance of essential functions and must be considered in establishing an AROI. The impact of other factors, such as chemical form, dietary characteristics and interactions amongst ETEs, are also critical in determining the AROI for ETEs. When ETE intakes are above or below the boundaries of the AROI, the capacity of the homeostatic mechanisms is exceeded and the probability and severity of adverse effects increase. The homeostatic model was used to establish the AROI and is illustrated with examples and a series of theoretical curves. The process begins with the selection of the database for a particular ETE. A weight-of-evidence approach is then used for hazard identification, selecting relevant end-points of deficient and excess exposures. Next, the probability of risk and the severity of various effects are quantified and critical effects are selected. The AROI is then established by balancing end-points of comparable health significance. At this time, the exposure assessment is conducted. Finally, a risk characterization enumerating the strengths and weaknesses of the databases is performed, integrating the AROI and exposure assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, some examples are provided as applications of spheroidal wave functions to the analysis of EM energy deposition and specific absorption rate in a spheroidal human head. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to the study of the optical properties of semiconductors. In this chapter we have discussed those phenomena involving only one photon frequency. In processes like absorption and reflection an incident electromagnetic wave illuminates the sample and the frequency of the wave is unchanged by its interaction with the sample. In the following chapter we shall discuss phenomena in which the frequency of the incident wave is altered by the sample. The optical properties of the sample studied in this chapter can be completely described by its complex dielectric function. A microscopic theory of this function shows that photons interact mainly with the electrons in semiconductors by exciting interband and intraband transitions. Interband transitions from the valence bands to the conduction bands produce peaks and shoulders in the optical spectra which can be attributed to Van Hove singularities in the valence-conduction band joint density of states. These structures can be greatly enhanced by using the technique of modulation spectroscopy, in which the derivatives of some optical response function with respect to either frequency or an external modulation (such as electric and stress fields) are measured. These optical measurements have provided an extremely sensitive test of existing electronic band structure calculations. Occasionally, disagreements between experimental and theoretical spectral peak positions and lineshapes have been found. These can be explained by the excitonic effect as a result of the Coulomb interaction between excited electrons and holes in the semiconductor. Intraband electronic transitions occur in doped semiconductors and their contribution to the optical properties can be obtained by using the Drude model proposed for free electrons in simple metals. Transitions between the discrete levels of impurities in semiconductors can also contribute to absorption of photons in the infrared. Although these extrinsic absorption processes are much waker than those involving intrinsic electronic transitions, they can give rise to extremely sharp peaks and have been a very useful and highly sensitive probe of the electronic energy levels of impurities. Finally, in polar semiconductors, such as those with the zincblende crystal structure, photons can be absorbed and reflected as a result of interaction with optical phonons. The reflectivity becomes particularly high for photons with frequency between the TO and LO phonon frequencies, giving rise to a phenomenon known for a long time as reststrahlen. The coupling between infrared-active optic phonons and electromagnetic waves can be so strong that they cannot be separated inside the medium. Instead, they should be regarded as coupled waves or quasiparticles known as phonon-polaritons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter Eleven is a new and unique presentation of practical applications of pyrometers and methods of preventing or eliminating errors. It considers: influence of target emissivity, methods of approaching black-body conditions, influence of surrounding walls, influence of atmosphere and sighting window absorption, influence of temperature of pyrometer sensing head, influence of partially covered or moving target. Properties and applications of pyrometers are collected in two important tables. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reports that a conventional photodetector operates by generating carriers which are produced by the absorption of a photon across the handgap, of the active semiconducting region. This absorption excites an electron from the valence band to the conduction band, thereby producing a photocurrent. However, in order for this absorption to occur, the photon energy /it' must he larger than the bandgap. This limits the useful spectral range of these detectors to the ultraviolet through near infrared region. Longer wavelengths require materials of very low bandgap that are difficult to grow, process, and fabricate into useful devices.

This article presents information on electro-optical (EO) devices. EO devices control light by using an electric field to induce changes in the refractive index and/or absorption of the material. The phenomena related to refractive index changes are known generally as the EO effect. When the induced change in the refractive index is proportional to the applied electric field E, this is known as the linear EO effect or the Pockels effect. Because the EO effect does not depend on the frequency of the drive voltage excluding the influence of the piezoelectric effect, various lithium niobate devices such as optical modulators, switches, and directional couplers are being developed for practical use in optical fiber communication, signal processing, and sensing technologies.

This article presents information on ferrite tile electromagnetic absorbing materials. The advantages of the ferrite-tile absorber are that they are small and offer very low reflectivity in the frequency range of 30 MHz to 600 MHz. However, above 600 MHz the performance of these ferrite tiles begins to degrade. Dielectric layers behind the ferrite tiles and tapered electric absorbing structures in front of the tiles are used to improve the high-frequency performance of the ferrites. The next generation of ferrite-tile absorbers, consisting of thin magnetic layers and a combination of ferrite layers with chiral materials, is currently being developed.

This article presents information on electroabsorption. Electroabsorption refers to the absorption of light or heat energy by some material in the presence of an electric field. One quality of electroabsorption is that the amount of absorption depends on the strength of the electric field. Electroabsorption measurements have helped to reveal the structures of very complicated materials, particularly semiconductors. In parallel with the study of electroabsorption, there has been a paradigm shift, in recent years, to use semiconductor materials to build better systems, accompanied by the need for faster, lower-cost, and higher-reliability components.

In the fourteenth century, South Asia became a region of travel and transport connecting Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. This redefined the location of all its agrarian territories. In the wake of the Mongols, overland corridors of routine communication extended from the Silk Road to Kanya Kumari and branched out to seaports along the way. Connections among distant parts of Eurasia became numerous and routine. New technology, ideas, habits, languages, people and needs came into farming communities. New elements entered local cuisine. People produced new powers of command, accumulation, and control, focused on strategic urban sites in agrarian space. By 1600, ships sailed between China, Gujarat, Europe, and America. Horses trotted across the land between Tajikistan and Egypt, Moscow and Madurai. Camels caravaned between Syria and Tibet, Ajmer, and Agra. A long expansion in world connections occurred during centuries when a visible increase in farming intensity was also reshaping agrarian South Asia. In the dry, interior uplands, warriors built late-medieval dynasties, on land formerly held by pastoralists and nomads; and sultans established a new political culture, whose hegemony would last to the nineteenth century. Slow but decisive change during late-medieval centuries laid the basis formore dramatic trends after 1500, when agricultural expansion accelerated along with the mobility and the local agrarian power of warriors and merchants. Regional formations of agrarian territory came into being, sewn together by urban networks, during a distinctively early modern period of agrarian history, whose patterns of social power, agricultural expansion, and cultural change embrace the empires of Akbar and the East India Company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long history of agriculture is of countless ecological interventions that have given nature its civility, and imparted personality to the land, as people have cut down forests, diverted rivers, built lakes, killed predators, tamed, bred, and slaughtered animals, and burnt, dug, and axed natural growth to replace it with things that people desire. Farming occurs in a land of emotion, and agrarian territories need gods, poetry, ritual, architecture, outsiders, frontiers, myths, border-lands, landmarks, and families, which give farms meaning and purpose. Together, brute power and refined aesthetics culture the land, and war is so prominent in old poetry because making a homeland is violent business. In the long span of agrarian history, therefore, a great variety of skills have combined to make nature a natural environment, and agrarian territories have emerged historically much like cuisine. Clearing the land and sculpting the fields create a place for the nurture and collection of ingredients. Skilled labour selects, cultivates, kills, dresses, chops, and grinds. Fuels, pots, knives, axes, hoes, mortar and pestle, and many other implements are involved in making all the daily meals and special feasts that sustain work, family, and community. Like a farmer's home territory, a cuisine's complexity and refinement always develop within networks of exchange and specialisation, because materials, ideas, techniques, and tastes come from many sources; but each cuisine also emerges inside spaces of cultured accumulation and experimentation, in which people experience their place in the world, territorially, as they make their very own set of special ingredients into appropriate foods for appropriate occasions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is seeing with the eyes of others, hearing with their ears, and pinning our faith on their understandings. The learned man prides himself in the knowledge of names, and dates, not of men or things. He thinks and cares nothing about his next-door neighbours, but he is deeply read in the tribes and casts of the Hindoos and Calmuc Tartars. Recent work on the relationship between early nineteenth-century Orientalism and Romantic literary texts has successfully challenged and extended Said's definition of a monolithic construction of ‘the Orient’ by deploying psychoanalytic models of interpretation and imperialism. By giving psychoanalysis the status of a metaphorical economy, critics, such as John Barrell and Nigel Leask, have been able to articulate and display the various forms of the imaginary, whilst maintaining a committed concern for an underlying material, social reality. By taking ‘anxiety’ as his startingpoint, Leask focuses on the instability within Romantic constructions of ‘the East’ and he is able to expose the variety of impulses within Romantic Orientalism which are simultaneously collusive with and critical of the hegemony of imperialism. The interrelationship between British culture and its construction of ‘the East’ mixes absorption and dominance with identification and differentiation so that, as others have pointed out, there is a profound ambivalence at the heart of the Orientalist imagination as a result of the subject's ‘inoculation’ and the enzymic nature of change taking place in the colonial culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PHYSICAL PORTRAIT OF THE TROPICS Alexander von Humboldt's huge engraving of the Ecuadorian mountains Chimborazo and Cotopaxi – considered to be the highest in the world – and of the vertical ecology of the Andes, was published in 1807 as the frontispiece to the first volume of his monumental Voyage en Amerique, entitled Essai sur la géographie des plantes, accompagné d'un tableau physique des pays équinoxiales. Humboldt's ‘Physical Portrait of the Tropics’ offers an extreme, but, nevertheless instructive case of the problems of exotic representation in the Romantic period, and of the contradiction between aesthetic affect and topographical information in mediating the non-European world to a European public, greedy for such images of its distant Others. On the one hand, the ‘Physical Portrait’ solicits an aesthetic response to Chimborazo, the partial ascent of which in 1802 had been, perhaps, the most celebrated episode in Humboldt's five-year expedition to Spanish America. Like the best eighteenth-century landscape traveller-artists, Humboldt claimed to have sketched Chimborazo ‘on the spot’; his field sketches, suffused with his own affective response to the sublimity of the mountain, provided the basis for further published engravings in his celebrated Vues des Cordillères, translated into English by Helen Maria Williams and published in 1814 as Researches concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America, with Descriptions and Views of Some of the most Striking Scenes in the Cordilleras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE SUGGESTION OF V-A THEORY The situation discussed at the end of the last chapter was described in papers that proposed that a Universal Fermi Interaction, one that applied to all weak interactions, was a linear combination of V and A. The theory was offered by Sudarshan and Marshak (1957, 1958) and by Feynman and Gell-Mann (1958). This was exactly the opposite conclusion drawn four years earlier by Konopinski and Langer, who had stated, “As we shall interpret the evidence here, the correct law must be what is known as an STP combination” (1953, p. 261). Sudarshan and Marshak examined the available evidence from nuclear β decay and other weak interactions, including strange particle decays, and concluded that the only possible choice for a Universal Fermi Interaction was a linear combination of V and A, even though there was evidence apparently in conflict with this choice. The four experiments cited in opposition to the V-A theory were The electron–neutrino angular correlation experiment on He6 by Rustad and Ruby (1953, 1955), which gave T as the β-decay interaction. The sign of the electron polarization from muon decay. The frequency of the electron mode in pion decay. The asymmetry in polarized neutron decay, which was smaller than predicted. They suggested, All of these experiments should be redone, particularly since some of them contradict the results of other recent experiments on the weak interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1940s and 1950s the search for a universal theory of weak interactions involved not only nuclear β decay but also the study of mesons. It was some time before it was realized that there was not one meson but two; the pion, which was the particle Yukawa had hypothesized to explain the nuclear force, and the muon, which was its decay product. We discussed earlier the failure of the attempts to incorporate the presumed decay of Yukawa's meson into the theory of β decay. Until 1940, there was, in fact, no evidence that the meson decayed at all. Although later scientists would interpret some early cloud chamber photographs as evidence for such a decay, this was possible only after the decay had been established. The first definitive evidence for such decay was presented by Williams and Roberts (1940). They presented one cloud chamber photograph that clearly showed a meson stopping in the gas followed by an emerging electron track (Figure 2.1). There was also indirect evidence for decay in the experiments on the anomalous absorption of mesons by Rossi and Hall (1941) and by Neilsen and associates (1941). In these 1941 experiments the absorption curves of mesons were measured at two different altitudes. The curves differed from those obtained with an equivalent amount of condensed matter absorber in place of the air. Slower mesons seemed to be preferentially absorbed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Soviet Interview Project (SIP) has interviewed thousands of recent emigrants from the Soviet Union as a means of learning about politics, work, and daily life in the contemporary USSR. The project was designed by a team of Soviet specialists as a study of everyday life in the USSR with the expectation that the results will contribute not only to Sovietology but also to general theories in the basic disciplines represented by the research team – notably political science, economics, and sociology. The initial phase of the project has involved administering highly structured questionnaires covering a wide range of topics bearing on life, work, and politics in contemporary Soviet society to a probability sample of eligible Soviet emigrants currently residing in the United States. As the principal aim has been to learn about life in the Soviet Union, the absorption process has been of interest for validation purposes only. The essays collected in this volume represent a first strike from the data set. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief history of the Soviet Interview Project, a description of the methods and procedures that have guided the SIP General Survey I, and an overview of first findings. History On August 3, 1979, a meeting was held at the Kennan Institute to promote a project to interview recent Soviet emigrants to the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]