Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
The film chronicles the ongoing struggles of passengers who were aboard the Golden Venture, an immigrant smuggling ship that ran aground near New York City in 1993. Passengers had paid at least $30,000 to be brought to the U.S. from China’s Fujian Province, expecting to arrive indebted but unnoticed. But a seemingly golden opportunity quickly … Read more
About 10 percent of the world’s population (~360 million people) live on or near potentially dangerous volcanoes. Many of the processes that take place on active volcanoes are potentially hazardous to local populations. Emergence of volcanology as a modern multidisciplinary science was largely a result of volcanic catastrophes that occurred at Krakatau Volcano in Indonesia … Read more
Flying a sensor on a plane or satellite and taking “photos” of the earth is a remarkably useful way for scientists to explore our dynamic planet. This process, called remote sensing, is one of the most efficient ways to detect large scale surface cover changes. My research demonstrates that Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), a very … Read more
Film professor Zhenhai Tang will introduce and discuss mainland Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (aka Sanxia Haoren), a last minute entry into the 2006 Venice Film Festival, that won the Golden Lion award thanks to its top-notch cinematography and wonderful storytelling. Still Life interweaves the story of a miner (Han Sanming) who travels thousands … Read more
Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever … Read more
Most people believe that any hurricanes that travel northward make a landfall on Eastern Long Island, and create few problems for people in the N.Y – N.J. Metropolitan Region. However, historical research shows that hurricanes have made direct landfalls in New York City in 1821 and 1993. The Major 1938 Hurricane made a landfall 70 … Read more