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Affirmative action in college admissions has been a polarizing policy since its inception, decried by some as unfairly biased and supported by others as a necessary corrective to institutionalized inequality. In recent years, the protected status of affirmative action has become uncertain, as legal challenges chip away at its foundations. This book looks through a sociological lens at both the history of affirmative action and its increasingly tenuous future. J. Scott Carter and Cameron D. Lippard first survey how and why so-called "colorblind" rhetoric was originally used to frame affirmative action and promote a political ideology. The authors then provide detailed examinations of a host of recent Supreme Court cases that have sought to threaten or undermine it. Carter and Lippard analyze why the arguments of these challengers have successfully influenced widespread changes in attitude toward affirmative action, concluding that the discourse and arguments over these policies are yet more unfortunate manifestations of the quest to preserve the racial status quo in the United States.
Much progress has been made recently in a number of areas by the application of new geometrical methods arising from advances in singularity theory. This collection of invited papers presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Real and Complex Singularities, held in August 1994 at ICMSC-USP (Sao Carlos), documents the geometric study of singularities and its applications.
1. A sphere -- 2. Surfaces, folds, and cusps -- 3. The inside and outside -- 4. Dimensions -- 5. Immersed surfaces -- 6. Movies -- 7. Movie moves -- 8. Taxonomic summary -- 9. How not to turn the sphere inside-out -- 10. A physical metaphor -- 11. Sarah's thesis -- 12. The eversion -- 13. The double point and fold surfaces
Surfaces in 4-Space, written by leading specialists in the field, discusses knotted surfaces in 4-dimensional space and surveys many of the known results in the area. Results on knotted surface diagrams, constructions of knotted surfaces, classically defined invariants, and new invariants defined via quandle homology theory are presented. The last chapter comprises many recent results, and techniques for computation are presented. New tables of quandles with a few elements and the homology groups thereof are included. This book contains many new illustrations of knotted surface diagrams. The reader of the book will become intimately aware of the subtleties in going from the classical case of knotted circles in 3-space to this higher dimensional case. As a survey, the book is a guide book to the extensive literature on knotted surfaces and will become a useful reference for graduate students and researchers in mathematics and physics.
This book constitutes a review volume on the relatively new subject of Quantum Topology. Quantum Topology has its inception in the 1984/1985 discoveries of new invariants of knots and links (Jones, Homfly and Kauffman polynomials). These invariants were rapidly connected with quantum groups and methods in statistical mechanics. This was followed by Edward Witten's introduction of methods of quantum field theory into the subject and the formulation by Witten and Michael Atiyah of the concept of topological quantum field theories.This book is a review volume of on-going research activity. The papers derive from talks given at the Special Session on Knot and Topological Quantum Field Theory of the American Mathematical Society held at Dayton, Ohio in the fall of 1992. The book consists of a self-contained article by Kauffman, entitled Introduction to Quantum Topology and eighteen research articles by participants in the special session.This book should provide a useful source of ideas and results for anyone interested in the interface between topology and quantum field theory.
African Immigrants in the United States: The Gendering Significance of Race? examines recent trends and implications of the growth of African immigration to the United States. Mamadi Corra highlights several resulting sociodemographic processes underway, including the changing composition of the foreign-born and US Black populations. Corra also explores sociodemographic profiles of these “new African Americans” or “new Americans,” highlighting the increasing diversity, yet also the racialized portrait of this group. Corra discusses key patterns including the shifting racial and gender composition of immigrants, with a growing proportion of “Black” and female African immigrants and a decreasing proportion of “White” and male immigrants. The book also compares socioeconomic profiles of African immigrants with other immigrant groups and Native American subgroups. Taken together, Corra discovers that the salience of race that is mediated by gender.
This marvelous book of pictures illustrates the fundamental concepts of geometric topology in a way that is very friendly to the reader. It will be of value to anyone who wants to understand the subject by way of examples. Undergraduates, beginning graduate students, and non-professionals will profit from reading the book and from just looking at the pictures.
This publication summarizes the current status of our understanding of RNA, with particular emphasis on the chemistry of this key biological molecule. The various RNAs covered are messenger RNA, ribosomal RNA, transfer RNA and RNA enzymes (ribozymes). The different chapters detail biophysical and chemical methods to investigate RNA structure and function, the synthesis of native and modified RNAs and the latest advances in our understanding of the vast array of biological processes in which RNA is involved.
This book is an introduction to techniques and results in diagrammatic algebra. It starts with abstract tensors and their categorifications, presents diagrammatic methods for studying Frobenius and Hopf algebras, and discusses their relations with topological quantum field theory and knot theory. The text is replete with figures, diagrams, and suggestive typography that allows the reader a glimpse into many higher dimensional processes. The penultimate chapter summarizes the previous material by demonstrating how to braid 3- and 4- dimensional manifolds into 5- and 6-dimensional spaces. The book is accessible to post-qualifier graduate students, and will also be of interest to algebraists, topologists and algebraic topologists who would like to incorporate diagrammatic techniques into their research.
The American cultural landscape has shifted considerably since the 1990s. As church attendance has declined, seculars have increased in number and in political involvement. The economy was supposed to be the most important issue in the 2008 and 2012 elections, but social issues such as gay rights and the status of women actually had a greater impact on vote choice. Moral issues and perceptions of candidate morality had less effect on voters in 2004 than in 2008. These arguments directly challenge the conventional wisdom concerning the 2004 and 2008 elections, which were supposedly decided on the basis of moral values and the economy respectively. Yet in The Politics of Sex, Susan B. Hansen j...