Photonics and nanotechnology are popular emerging fields of technology. This proceedings volume contains over 12 selected papers from the International Workshop and Conference on Photonics and Nanotechnology (ICPN) 2007, held in Pattaya, Thailand, from December 16-18, 2007. The papers cover a wide range of topics, from optical and nonlinear optical physics to nanoelectronics.

Recognized as the father of palliative care in North America, Balfour Mount facilitated a sea change in medical practice by foregrounding concern for the whole person facing incurable illness. In this intimate and far-reaching memoir, Mount leads the reader through the formative moments and milestones of his personal and professional life as they intersected with the history of medical treatment over the last fifty years. Mount's lifelong pursuit of understanding the needs of dying patients began during his training as a surgical oncologist at Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital in the 1960s. He established the first comprehensive clinical program for end-of-life care in a teaching hospital in 1975 at McGill University's Royal Victoria Hospital, thus leading the charge for palliative medicine as a new specialty. His journey included collaboration with two storied healthcare innovators, British hospice pioneer Dame Cicely Saunders and American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, leading to a more fulsome understanding of the physical, psychosocial, and existential or spiritual needs of patients, their families, and their caregivers in the health care setting. This compelling narrative documents how the 'Royal Vic' team became internationally recognized as effective advocates of quality of life at the crossroad between life and death. From meetings with Viktor Frankl, the Dalai Lama and other teachers, to a memorable telephone chat with Mother Teresa, Mount recalls with appreciation, humour and humility, the places and people that helped to shed light on this universal human experience.

The blues revival of the early 1960s brought new life to a seminal genre of American music and inspired a vast new world of singers, songwriters, and rock bands. The Rolling Stones took their name from a Muddy Waters song; Led Zeppelin forged bluesy riffs into hard rock and heavy metal; and ZZ Top did superstar business with boogie rhythms copped from John Lee Hooker. Crossroads tells the myriad stories of the impact and enduring influence of the early-'60s blues revival: stories of the record collectors, folkies, beatniks, and pop culture academics; and of the lucky musicians who learned life-changing lessons from the rediscovered Depression-era bluesmen that found hipster renown by playing at coffeehouses, on college campuses, and at the Newport Folk Festival. The blues revival brought notice to these forgotten musicians, and none more so than Robert Johnson, who had his songs covered by Cream and the Rolling Stones, and who sold a million CDs sixty years after dying outside a Mississippi Delta roadhouse. Crossroads is the intersection of blues and rock 'n' roll, a vivid portrait of the fluidity of American folk culture that captures the voices of musicians, promoters, fans, and critics to tell this very American story of how the blues came to rest at the heart of popular music.

Due to the increasingly complex mineralogy, and lower grade of many current ore reserves, technology has, over the past decade, had to evolve rapidly to treat these materials economically in an industry which has undergone severe periods of recession. However, most of the technical innovations, such as the increasing use of solvent-extraction, ion-exchange etc., have been in the field of chemical ore processing, and, apart from the use of computers and ever larger unit process machines, there have been few major evolutionary changes in the field of physical mineral processing, where conventional crushing and grinding methods, essentially unchanged in half a century, are followed by the 'old-faithfuls'- flotation, gravity, magnetic and electrostatic methods of separation. Many of these techniques have major limitations in the treatment of 'new' ores such as complex sulphides, and the main purpose of the NATO Advanced study Institute (ASI) "Mineral Processing at a Crossroads" was to review the future of mineral processing. One of the great failings of physical methods is their inability to treat ultra-fine particles, and much research effort is required in this area. Flotation is still the most widely used and researched method for separating minerals, and is the only method which can be used to produce separate concentrates from complex sulphide ores. However, its performance on these 'modern' ores is poor, and it is in this area particularly that chemical methods will increasingly be integrated into plant circuits.

The Gospel of Thomas is one of the most debated early Christian writings. Discovered as a Coptic translation in the Nag Hammadi Library, its date, message and relation to the canonical gospels have been the subject of much divisive argument. This book offers new perspectives on the gospel and demonstrates the various ways in which it sheds light on the ideological and social history of early Christianity.Expert scholars go to the heart of current issues in Thomasine studies, such as the role of oral and written traditions in the composition of the gospel, Thomas' relationship with the Gospel of John and with Gnostic and ascetic tendencies in early Christianity, the gospel's attitude to women followers of Jesus and to Jewish ritual practices.

The highly performative categories of 'Irish culture' and 'Irishness' are in need of critical address, prompted by recent changes in Irish society, the arts industry and modes of critical inquiry. This book broaches this task by considering Irish expressive culture through some of the paradigms and vocabularies offered by performance studies.

In stories, recipes, and photographs, James Beard Award–winning writer Robb Walsh and acclaimed documentary photographer O. Rufus Lovett take us on a barbecue odyssey from East Texas to the Carolinas and back. In Barbecue Crossroads, we meet the pitmasters who still use old-fashioned wood-fired pits, and we sample some of their succulent pork shoulders, whole hogs, savory beef, sausage, mutton, and even some barbecued baloney. Recipes for these and the side dishes, sauces, and desserts that come with them are painstakingly recorded and tested. But Barbecue Crossroads is more than a cookbook; it is a trip back to the roots of our oldest artisan food tradition and a look at how Southern culture is changing. Walsh and Lovett trace the lineage of Southern barbecue backwards through time as they travel across a part of the country where slow-cooked meat has long been part of everyday life. What they find is not one story, but many. They visit legendary joints that don’t live up to their reputations—and discover unknown places that deserve more attention. They tell us why the corporatizing of agriculture is making it difficult for pitmasters to afford hickory wood or find whole hogs that fit on a pit. Walsh and Lovett also remind us of myriad ways that race weaves in and out of the barbecue story, from African American cooking techniques and recipes to the tastes of migrant farmworkers who ate their barbecue in meat markets, gas stations, and convenience stores because they weren’t welcome in restaurants. The authors also expose the ways that barbecue competitions and TV shows are undermining traditional barbecue culture. And they predict that the revival of the community barbecue tradition may well be its salvation.

In 1946, approximately 40,000 U.S. military personnel participated in Operation CROSSROADS, an atmospheric nuclear test that took place at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Congress passed a law directing the Veterans Administration to determine whether there were any long-term adverse health effects associated with exposure to ionizing radiation from the detonation of nuclear devices. This book contains the results of an extensive epidemiological study of the mortality of participants compared with a similar group of nonparticipants. Topics of discussion include a breakdown of the study rationale; an overview of other studies of veteran participants in nuclear tests; and descriptions of Operation CROSSROADS, data sources for the study, participant and comparison cohorts, exposure details, mortality ascertainment, and findings and conclusions.

This is a book about the enormous changes that took place at Baylor University from 1991 to 2003, as seen through the perceptive eyes of its provost at the time, Donald D. Schmeltekopf. On the front end was the charter revision, a change that permanently restructured the legal governance of the university. On the back end was Baylor 2012, a grand vision for the university issued by the Board of Regents on September 21, 2001. There were several critical crossroads along the way to what has now been created at Baylor, a Christian research university, one of a kind among church-related universities in the Protestant orbit. These memoirs tell the story of this transformation from the perspective of one who was leading at the crossroads.