Brown Says Research Articles

Why we need a new definition of information security

There is an old Peanuts strip where Charlie Brown says, “Working here is like wetting your pants in the pool, wearing a dark bathing suit. You get that warm feeling but nobody notices.” Increasingly, I think computer security professionals in large enterprises are in that metaphorical swimming pool. In fact, many are swimming in the deep end without their water wings. When computer security professionals do an excellent job protecting systems and information, the number of bad outcomes decreases. After a generation of peace, pretty soon people start asking why we need the army. I believe this problem stems in part from a fuzzy fundamental: the definition of information security.

Sharks' Gel Behaves Like Semiconductor

There could be some fascinating molecular electronics going on in there, declares Brandon R. Brown, assistant physics professor at the University of San Francisco. He's referring to a gel-filled organ on a shark's snout that it uses to find fish prey and to orient itself. Brown has had sharks on his mind for years. When he was a graduate student, an acquaintance told him that sharks could detect electric fields. His friend surmised that sharks might have superconductors in their heads. I thought that was crazy, Brown says. Nevertheless, the idea stuck in his mind, and Brown began studying shark gel a couple of years ago. First, he found that the gel's electrical properties vary with temperature. Semiconductors share that behavior, and they also exhibit a large thermoelectric effect—generating electricity when the ends of the semiconductor are exposed to different temperatures. Brown has now determined that shark gel shares this properly as well ...

The Saints in the Lives of Italian-Americans: An Interdisciplinary Investigation (review)

The Saints in the Lives of Italian-Americans:An Interdisciplinary Investigation. Co-edited by Joseph A. Varacalli, Salvatore Primeggia, Salvatore J. LaGumina, and Donald J. D'Elia. [Filibrary Series, No. 14.] (Stony Brook: Forum Italicum, Center for Italian Studies, State University of New York. 1999. Pp. xi, 323. $20.00 paperback.) Italian Americans disapproved of the liturgical changes mandated by the Second Vatican Council, Salvatore Primeggia says in his contribution to this collection of articles on the cult of saints among southern Italian immigrants and their descendants in the United States, but he offers not single piece of evidence to support this assertion. Mary Elizabeth Brown says at the end of her chapter that to their [it makes sense in her view to talk about single, coherent, unified Italian American community for all places and times] delivered a kind of electric shock to restore the heartbeat of the cult of saints. (The challenges Brown refers to are the civil, gay, or women's rights which affronted Italian American traditional values and neighborhood cohesiveness. Presumably she just knows, and assumes that her readers will know too, that all Italian Americans are traditionally racist, homophobic, and sexist so that none of them would have endorsed the values or goals of these movements because she simply asserts this without support.) Brown's only evidence for the revival of the cult of saints among contemporary Italian Americans is John Paul It's 1983 Divines perfectionis. These two examples are indicative of the tone and method of this collection. A strong sense of loss pervades the articles in The Saints in the Lives of ItalianAmericans for the Church before the Second Vatican Council and for the old Italian American neighborhoods as the authors imagine that church and those neighborhoods to have been. Rather than what it purports to be,an interdisciplinary investigation, the book is an example of the aggrieved and recriminatory literature of memory in modern American Catholic culture. Instead of evidence for any of these claims, the authors offer only their own nostalgia and anger as documentation. Victimization is the primary historical explanation. The saints were pushed out, Italian American folk religious culturewas suppressed and destroyed by the Irish, and upwardly mobile Italian Americans are .pressur[ed] into conforming to American middle-class styles (according respectively to Richard Renoff [p. 125], Salvatore LaGumina [p. 131], and Joseph A. Varacalli Ip. 81). But the authors are not without hope: if John Paul II's overall restorationist agenda is successful, Varacalli says in his introduction, then perhaps the saints will be able to recapture their turf. …

China's projected cereals deficits in a world context

Abstract Lester Brown's recent writings about trends in China's food consumption, production and rapidly rising import requirements and his predictions that the world is running out of potential to increase production of cereals received wide publicity in the press. They increased awareness of the problem among the public, which was stimulated by recent declines in world cereals production per capita, falling stocks and sharp rises in world market prices. This paper is an attempt on my part to extract a coherent picture of what Brown says about China and the world and examine it in the light of what we know about this country and of possible developments in the world as a whole. I make the following conclusions. 1. 1. Brown misjudges China's potential to maintain and indeed increase cereals production because he misinterprets the data on land losses (he treats diversion of land from cereals to, mainly, other crops and aquaculture as if such land were lost to food production), he ignores new data which indicate that China has more agricultural land than reported in official statistics and his projected numbers do not account for responses on the part of producers, consumers and government policy to an increasing scarcity of products and rising prices. 2. 2. The analogies he draws with the experiences of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are inappropriate. 3. 3. China will probably be a growing net importer of cereals but at levels much below those projected by Brown. 4. 4. World production of cereals may indeed grow at a lower rate than in the long-term past (but not as low as that projected by Brown) which could be sufficient to accommodate China's growing import requirements and the probable ones of other countries. 5. 5. The world food problem is one of persistence of very low food consumption levels and high incidence of undernutrition in many developing countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The persistence of severe food insecurity problems reflects not so much constraints in increasing food production in the world as whole but development failures (often agricultural development failures) and the persistence of poverty in certain countries.

China's projected cereals deficits in a world context

AbstractLester Brown's recent writings about trends in China's food consumption, production and rapidly rising import requirements and his predictions that the world is running out of potential to increase production of cereals received wide publicity in the press. They increased awareness of the problem among the public, which was stimulated by recent declines in world cereals production per capita, falling stocks and sharp rises in world market prices. This paper is an attempt on my part to extract a coherent picture of what Brown says about China and the world and examine it in the light of what we know about this country and of possible developments in the world as a whole. I make the following conclusions.1. Brown misjudges China's potential to maintain and indeed increase cereals production because he misinterprets the data on land losses (he treats diversion of land from cereals to, mainly, other crops and aquaculture as if such land were, lost to food production), he ignores new data which indicate that China has more agricultural land than reported in official statistics and his projected numbers do not account for responses on the part of producers, consumers and government policy to an increasing scarcity of products and rising prices.2. The analogies he draws with the experiences of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are inappropriate.3. China will probably be a growing net importer of cereals but at levels much below those projected by Brown.4. World production of cereals may indeed grow at a lower rate than in the long‐term past (but not as low as that projected by Brown) which could be sufficient to accommodate China's growing import requirements and the probable ones of other countries.5. The world food problem is one of persistence of very low food consumption levels and high incidence of undernutrition in many developing countries, mainly in sub‐Saharan Africa and South Asia.The persistence of severe food insecurity problems reflects not so much constraints in increasing food production in the world as whole but development failures (often agricultural development failures) and the persistence of poverty in certain countries.

GOP BUDGET CUTTING PLANS

Congressional Republicans have made good on their promise to produce a plan to balance the federal budget by 2002. The House plan goes much further than the Senate's in terms of wholesale rearrangement of government. But the effect of both on the chemical community is summed up in six words by one GOP leader: protect fundamental science and end corporate welfare. The House Budget Committee's plan calls for elimination of three Cabinet departments—Commerce, Education, and Energy. The Senate Budget Committee's proposal would eliminate only Commerce. But the department's activities wouldn't really be eliminated by either plan. Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown says plans to do away with his department are ludicrous and don't make sense. He points out that nearly two-thirds of Commerce's functions would be preserved under both plans, including the Patent & Trademark Office, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. The programs to be eliminated, he notes, ...

Environmental Protection Agency Sets Blueprint For Revamping R&D Effort

The Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research & Development (ORD) is headed for a major shakeup. Long underutilized by the agency and criticized for being overmanaged in recent studies, the office is now up for reauthorization by Congress and for reorganization by EPA Administrator Carol M. Browner. An integral part of strengthening the quality of science at EPA will be the reinvigorating of our research program, Browner told the full House Committee on Science, Space & Technology during a hearing on July 27. Our goal is nothing less than to create the premier environmental science organization in the country. Committee chairman George E. Brown Jr. (D.-Calif.) agrees that it is past time for EPA to upgrade the quality of its science. Regrettably, EPA's ORD has failed to satisfactorily address research and research management issues, some of which were identified when I first became chairman of the environment subcommittee over 18 years ago, Brown says. An ...

From Cynthia Hawkins

then teaching assistants, myself and Eileen Griffen, helped found the feminist newspaper Goodbye to All That before coming to the California Institute of the Arts in 1970. The paper was cited as one of the best of the new feminist publications in the New York Times that year. Griffen and also collaborated on the first of a series of rape films using a raw meat metaphor that same year, two years before that image reappeared in collaboration between Lacy, myself, Chicago, and Orgel of the rape performance Ablutions. Reading Lacy's account, referring to Kaprow's developing theory . . . linked to feminist analysis (p. 65), thought: the ideas have survived sans matrilineal attribution. -The writer is a project artist formerly based in California and now in New York. From Cynthia Hawkins: As an abstract painter concerned with the social, environmental, and political problems facing all of us, but one whose work isn't based on correct politics, thank you for the recent issue on Constructed Painting, guest edited by Curt Barnes (AJ, Spring 1991). was particularly impressed with essays by Sam Gilliam, Jonathan Santlofer, and Ken Sofer, which suggest that artists think and write about their work in a different manner than curators and critics. For an artist, think a discussion of one's work illustrates that spoken or written language and visual language cannot truly meet and must be adjusted from time to time. To quote what Larry Brown says about the art-making process: I see it as a consistent and ongoing process, mysterious and magical. It is still evolving (p. 9). -The writer is Patricia Roberts Harris Fellow at Maryland Institute, College ofArt.

Sasha Sokolov's Palisandriia: History and Myth

The demythologizing of the official version of Soviet history has been one of the most important developments in post-Stalin literature. Nostalgia for history, Boris Shragin calls it.1 In accordance with Russian political tradition, the government took the first taboo-lifting steps, initiating the policy of deStalinization and the cautious re-evaluation of the recent Soviet past. The association of letters with the recovery of the historical and personal past has been especially striking in the very rich memoir and testimonial literature of the post-Stalin period, manifest most clearly in Solzhenitsyn's writing. Coming to terms with Soviet history has taken the form of collective purifying ritual that has affected all of Russian literature-traditional and experimental, official and unofficial, fictional and documentary. Whereas the more traditional writers have demythologized the past by means of its accurate, thorough, and reconstruction, the more innovative authors have followed the dictum of Abram Tertz, developing a phantasmagoric art [...] in which the grotesque has replaced realistic description.2 Post-Stalin liberalization has not been limited to the public domain: the rehabilitation of literary eroticism is the most obvious example of taboo-lifting in the private sphere.3 But in the politicized atmosphere of unofficial Russian culture, even sexually explicit literature and obscenity have become informed with political meaning; shocking political revelation is intensified by shocking language and provocative sexual description. As Edward Brown says of Yuz Aleshkovsky, these writers have produced massive scatological detonation which explodes the official Russian language into shreds.4

The Salem Riots, 1882. Judiciary versus Executive in the Mediation of a Communal Dispute

Studies on the origins of Hindu–Muslim riots in nineteenth-century India have rightly stressed the distinction between what Professor Norman Brown calls ‘the precipitating causes’ of conflict and the deepseated religio-cultural differences that have long kept these two communities apart. As Norman Brown says, the precipitating cause ‘might be a quarrel over ownership of a parcel of land and the right to erect a religious building on it, or the playing of music by a Hindu wedding procession as it passed a mosque where such a noise constituted sacrilege, or exaction of exorbitant rent or interest by a landlord or moneylender of one religious persuasion from a tenant or debtor of the other, or sacrifice of a cow by Muslims, or the clash of crowds when a Hindu and a Muslim festival coincided’.

Pseudo-Guidance Programs in Our Schools

Unqualified statements may give only part of the truth, but there are times when a bit of the truth is better than none. Brown says categorically that giving a program a standard form and calling it guidance does not make it so.

Appleton's New Practical Cyclopedia.

In the introduction Commissioner Brown says: "It is one province of works of reference to supply, to a reasonable degree, the definite and elementary information which will enable any ordinary reader to make good his individual lack of knowledge on any subject of ordinary discussion," An examination of this work in six volumes, as compared with the "Universal Cyclopedia" of the same publishers in twelve volumes, shows that this decrease in volume has been secured by leaving out many subjects contained in the longer work and by condensation and abbreviations of others. The publishers say that an attempt has been made to give the descriptions of technical things in language that may be easily understood by any one. The work is, of course, intended for those who cannot afford to own and have not access to the larger and more exhaustive works of general reference, and should be judged on that

Brewing and Research 1

IN 1901 the great brewing firm of Messrs. Guinness in Dublin instituted a research laboratory, in which the work has been conducted by four trained investigators under the direction of Dr. Horace T. Brown. With characteristic generosity, Messrs. Guinness have rendered the results so far obtained available for other workers in the same field by the publication of a first volume of Transactions. Appreciation of these results will by no means be confined to the circle of scientific men technically interested in brewing, for Messrs. Guinness' investigators have been seeking for that exact knowledge which is of permanent scientific value and at the same time affords a basis whereon technical process can be built with some degree of confidence and promise. The problems of the brewer really appeal to a very wide circle; because they are the problems involved in the biological chemistry of the germinating plant and of the yeasts and other lower organisms, they become the problems of the plant physiologist, of the agricultural chemist, and even of the animal physiologist. As Dr. Brown says in his preface, “Could we determine, in the early stages of the germination of a grain of barley, all the ‘ down grade ’ chemical changes of the nitrogenous substances stored in the endosperm, and follow the products as they enter the embryonic plant and are once more built up into proteid, we should have a key to many obscure problems connected with the life processes of plants and animals.”

The Maoris

AN unusually lengthy Report from the Registrar-General of New Zealand on the condition of that colony, which has lately been laid before Parliament, contains some interesting information respecting the present condition of the Maoris. Mr. Brown says that, according to the traditions of the Maoris, their ancestors first arrived in New Zealand from an island in the Pacific Ocean, to which the name of Hawaiki is given. Since that event it appears, from genealogical sticks kept by the tohungas, or priests, that about 20 generations of the race have lived. The number of the Maori race at the time of the first foundation of the colony, in 1840, was estimated at about 80,000. Twenty years previously the number had been estimated at 100,000. In 1857 an enumeration of the race was made, from which it appeared that the number of males was then about 31,667, and that of the females about 24,303; and of those whose sex was not stated, 79; a total of 56,049. Subsequent attempts at enumeration have been made; but, owing to the objections felt by natives to stating their numbers, and to the difficulties experienced in obtaining information in those parts to which the European was not allowed free access, with not wholly satisfactory results. The latest, and probably most accurate, of these enumerations, was made in 1886. This gave the number of males as 22,840, and the females as 19,129; a total of 41,969.