Ethnically bounded homeownership: qualitative insights on Los Angeles immigrant homeowners’ experiences during the U.S. Great Recession

Immigrant homeowners’ function within ethnic boundaries in the housing market may have helped or hindered them during the recent U.S. Great Recession. This research explores this theme through interviews with immigrant and non-immigrant homeowners from four ethnic communities in Los Angeles County and the non-profit organizations that tried to assist them. Immigrant homeowners turned to co-ethnics for advice and support and formed multigenerational households as a strategy to achieve and sustain homeownership. Language and cultural barriers primed them for risky loans and thwarted their pursuit of refinance and modification when they struggled to make mortgage payments. These findings conform to existing evidence of ethnic segmentation in the housing market and imply that analyses of home buying and homeownership in areas with significant immigrant populations should factor in the role of ethnicity.     

Invited article: the fast readout low noise camera as a versatile x-ray detector for time resolved dispersive extended x-ray absorption fine structure and diffraction studies of dynamic problems in materials science, chemistry, and catalysis

Originally conceived and developed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) as an "area" detector for rapid x-ray imaging studies, the fast readout low noise (FReLoN) detector of the ESRF [J.-C. Labiche, ESRF Newsletter 25, 41 (1996)] has been demonstrated to be a highly versatile and unique detector. Charge coupled device (CCD) cameras at present available on the public market offer either a high dynamic range or a high readout speed. A compromise between signal dynamic range and readout speed is always sought. The parameters of the commercial cameras can sometimes be tuned, in order to better fulfill the needs of specific experiments, but in general these cameras have a poor duty cycle (i.e., the signal integration time is much smaller than the readout time). In order to address scientific problems such as time resolved experiments at the ESRF, a FReLoN camera has been developed by the Instrument Support Group at ESRF. This camera is a low noise CCD camera that combines high dynamic range, high readout speed, accuracy, and improved duty cycle in a single image. In this paper, we show its application in a quasi-one-dimensional sense to dynamic problems in materials science, catalysis, and chemistry that require data acquisition on a time scale of milliseconds or a few tens of milliseconds. It is demonstrated that in this mode the FReLoN can be applied equally to the investigation of rapid changes in long range order (via diffraction) and local order (via energy dispersive extended x-ray absorption fine structure) and in situations of x-ray hardness and flux beyond the capacity of other detectors.     

Telecommunications and Spatial Restructuring: An Australian Perpective

Changes over the past twenty-five years in information and communication technology (ICT) are beginning to provide us with a clearer picture of the technical platform that will influence the shape of urban and industrial development into the 21st century. During this period we have experienced a number of key paradigm shifts in computing: from 1960s batch systems to 1970s time sharing systems to 1980s desktop systems (Newton et al. 1988). At the same time, but somewhat independently, communications were evolving from the slow speed analogue public switched telephone network which provided a measure of computer-to-computer interaction (via modems) to the newly emerging high speed broadband digital networks, networks which will provide a truly vast array of value added products and services (discussed more fully in Cavill and Fidler' paper). The dramatic price-performance improvements in these technologies and the synergy which now exists between computers and communications provides us in the 1990s with the core information infrastructure of the future: computers and the networks that interconnect them (Newton etal. 1991).     

Modulation Excitation X-Ray Absorption Spectroscopy to Probe Surface Species on Heterogeneous Catalysts

The advantages and open questions of the combination of modulation excitation spectroscopy and phase sensitive detection (PSD) with X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) for the analysis of heterogeneous catalysts at work are reviewed. The characteristic spectral signatures of two different edges (Pd K and Pt L₃) are described in relation to the red-ox chemistry of Pd/Al₂O₃ and Pt/Al₂O₃ with respect to NO reduction by CO and CO oxidation, respectively. Both examples demonstrate that PSD makes XAS sensitive to potentially active species for the catalytic reaction.