Overcoming Barriers in Communities

Panelist Evelyn Cardona, discussed the work of the Brooklyn Coalition Against Family Violence, where she is the director, her own experience as a battered woman, and how she overcame it. Panelist Nechama Wolfson, president of the Shalom Task Force, then talked about the work of Shalom Task Force, a grasroots group of Orthodox Jewish women was doing on the community. Panelist Angela Lee, associate director of the New York Asian Women\u27s Center, discussed the work her organization does with Asian battered women. Panelist Mircia Sanchez discussed the Harlem Dowling West Side Center for Children and Family Services, where she is a coordinator, and their work with children who come into foster care because of domestic violence. Panelist Maria Arias, supervising attorney at the Battered Women\u27s Rights Clinic, discussed the importance of looking at how factors like racism, being an immigrant, and being poor affect the experience of a battered woman. Panelist Anurardha Sharma, Executive Director for SAKHI for South Asian Women, discussed the organization, the kinds of abuse and violence South Asian women experience, and some of the barriers that women these women face

Overcoming Participation Constraints

In incomplete information environments with transferable utility, efficient outcomes are generally implementable unless interim or ex post participation constraints are imposed on the problem. In this paper we show that linking a sufficiently large number of independent but possibly unrelated social decisions, a slightly perturbed Groves mechanism can implement an efficient outcome with probability arbitrarily close to one, while respecting all participation, incentive and balanced budget constraints.Linking, Participation constraints, Perturbed groves mechanism

Overcoming migration during giant planet formation

In the core accretion model, gas giant formation is a race between growth and migration; for a core to become a jovian planet, it must accrete its envelope before it spirals into the host star. We use a multizone numerical model to extend our previous investigation of the "window of opportunity" for gas giant formation within a disk. When the collision cross-section enhancement due to core atmospheres is taken into account, we find that a broad range of protoplanetary disks posses such a window.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figs, accepted to ApJ

Surviving Homophobia: Overcoming Evil Environments

Thinking of the evils of homophobia and what is needed to survive them requires acknowledging a new category of evil besides the evils of individual deeds, social practices and social structures. That further category is evil social environments. Building on the work of Jeremy Waldron on the harm in hate speech, this chapter extends that account to certain hate crimes that, like the written word, send a lingering social message. The cases of four women survivors of homophobia are then examined in relation to such harm. Two who wrote memoirs had been targeted for murder, one in an evil environment, the other in a more positively responsive environment. The remaining two survival stories are less dramatic. But they are important in how they illustrate ordinary challenges faced successfully by lesbians and gay men in emotionally toxic environments, and how, in this sense, those not directly threatened with murder might still be justly regarded as survivors. The chapter concludes with reflections on the meanings of survival and some of the costs of surviving an evil homophobic environment