Women\u27s Health and Abortion Rights: Whole Woman\u27s Health v Hellerstedt

Nearly a quarter century ago, the Supreme Court asked pro-choice and right-to-life advocates “to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.” Nothing of the sort materialized. If anything, the social and political battles intensified, with states enacting 1074 abortion restrictions. The Court has not considered various appeals in the face of an avalanche of legislation, but on June 27, 2016, it struck down 2 onerous restrictions on physicians and clinics offering abortion services. In Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt, the Court found Texas’s requirements that physicians conducting abortions obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals and that licensed abortion facilities meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers to be unconstitutional. Stephen Breyer, writing for a 5-3 majority, held that the restrictions failed to offer medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens on women’s access to abortion. This article explores the implications of Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt for other abortion restrictions that purportedly safeguard women’s health; for access to abortion in Texas and other parts of the country; and for the health, rights, and dignity of women seeking abortion, particularly those who are disproportionately affected by restrictions and other burdens on access. The article includes a table describing state abortion restrictions across the country, together with pending court cases

Sexual Assaults Among University Students: Prevention, Support, and Justice

Sexual assault is common among college-aged women (18 to 25 years), with 1 in 5 reporting having experienced these crimes during their college years. Acute and long-term consequences of sexual assault may include physical trauma, sexually transmitted infections, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and substance abuse. Survivors have the option of reporting assaults to the university or to the police, but the goals of these 2 systems—and women’s experiences with them—can be quite different. The criminal justice system’s principal aim is to adjudicate guilt, but the university has the broader purpose of fostering a safe learning environment. This article explores how university administrators can help prevent sexual assaults and, if necessary, fairly adjudicate claims. The critical points of intervention include nurturing a respectful environment; encouraging reporting; ensuring fair and rigorous investigations; implementing appropriate sanctions for inappropriate behavior; and reintegrating survivors back into the academic community. Importantly, coordination and cooperation between the university and criminal justice systems will improve experiences for survivors of sexual assault

Randomised, controlled trial of effectiveness of ampicillin in mild acute respiratory infections in Indonesian children.

The recommended treatment for mild acute respiratory infections (ARI) in children is supportive care only, but many physicians, especially in developing countries, continue to prescribe antibiotic treatment because they believe it prevents progression to more severe ARI. To find out whether ampicillin treatment conferred any benefit over supportive care alone, a randomised, controlled trial was carried out among 889 children (under 5 years) with mild ARI in Indonesia. 447 were randomly allocated ampicillin (25-30 mg/kg body weight three times daily for 5 days) plus supportive care (continued breastfeeding, clearing of the nose, and paracetamol to control fever); 442 were allocated supportive care only. The treatment groups were almost identical after randomisation in terms of age, sex, level of parental education, history of measles immunisation, and fever. After 1 week the percentages cured were nearly identical (204 [46%] ampicillin; 209 [47%] control), as were the percentages of cases progressing to moderate ARI (56 [13%] vs 53 [12%]). The effect of treatment was not modified by age, sex, measles immunisation status, or the educational level of the parents. At the 2-week follow-up, the percentages cured were 62% (277) in the ampicillin group and 58% (256) in the control group; 14% of both groups had progressed to moderate ARI; and 24% (107) and 28% (123), respectively, still had mild ARI. None of the differences in outcome between the ampicillin and control groups was statistically significant. Thus, ampicillin plus supportive care offers no benefit over supportive care alone for treatment of mild ARI in young Indonesian children

Interpreting Parenting Plans as Contracts

When parents are divorced or separated, a parenting plan serves as a legal instrument to govern the means by which they raise their children. Most parents are able to compromise and reach an agreed-upon parenting plan without resorting to a trial or court intervention. These agreed-upon parenting plans are, in a manner of speaking, contracts that these parents must abide by. But too often parenting plans are not treated or considered in the same way we perceive ordinary contracts. They should be. This essay examines the interplay between courts reviewing agreed-upon plans, the best interest standard, and basic contract interpretation

Entangled networks, synchronization, and optimal network topology

A new family of graphs, {\it entangled networks}, with optimal properties in many respects, is introduced. By definition, their topology is such that optimizes synchronizability for many dynamical processes. These networks are shown to have an extremely homogeneous structure: degree, node-distance, betweenness, and loop distributions are all very narrow. Also, they are characterized by a very interwoven (entangled) structure with short average distances, large loops, and no well-defined community-structure. This family of nets exhibits an excellent performance with respect to other flow properties such as robustness against errors and attacks, minimal first-passage time of random walks, efficient communication, etc. These remarkable features convert entangled networks in a useful concept, optimal or almost-optimal in many senses, and with plenty of potential applications computer science or neuroscience.Comment: Slightly modified version, as accepted in Phys. Rev. Let

Modulus Computational Entropy

The so-called {\em leakage-chain rule} is a very important tool used in many security proofs. It gives an upper bound on the entropy loss of a random variable $X$ in case the adversary who having already learned some random variables $Z_{1},\ldots,Z_{\ell}$ correlated with $X$, obtains some further information $Z_{\ell+1}$ about $X$. Analogously to the information-theoretic case, one might expect that also for the \emph{computational} variants of entropy the loss depends only on the actual leakage, i.e. on $Z_{\ell+1}$. Surprisingly, Krenn et al.\ have shown recently that for the most commonly used definitions of computational entropy this holds only if the computational quality of the entropy deteriorates exponentially in $|(Z_{1},\ldots,Z_{\ell})|$. This means that the current standard definitions of computational entropy do not allow to fully capture leakage that occurred "in the past", which severely limits the applicability of this notion. As a remedy for this problem we propose a slightly stronger definition of the computational entropy, which we call the \emph{modulus computational entropy}, and use it as a technical tool that allows us to prove a desired chain rule that depends only on the actual leakage and not on its history. Moreover, we show that the modulus computational entropy unifies other,sometimes seemingly unrelated, notions already studied in the literature in the context of information leakage and chain rules. Our results indicate that the modulus entropy is, up to now, the weakest restriction that guarantees that the chain rule for the computational entropy works. As an example of application we demonstrate a few interesting cases where our restricted definition is fulfilled and the chain rule holds.Comment: Accepted at ICTS 201

Constraint Satisfaction with Counting Quantifiers

We initiate the study of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) in the presence of counting quantifiers, which may be seen as variants of CSPs in the mould of quantified CSPs (QCSPs). We show that a single counting quantifier strictly between exists^1:=exists and exists^n:=forall (the domain being of size n) already affords the maximal possible complexity of QCSPs (which have both exists and forall), being Pspace-complete for a suitably chosen template. Next, we focus on the complexity of subsets of counting quantifiers on clique and cycle templates. For cycles we give a full trichotomy -- all such problems are in L, NP-complete or Pspace-complete. For cliques we come close to a similar trichotomy, but one case remains outstanding. Afterwards, we consider the generalisation of CSPs in which we augment the extant quantifier exists^1:=exists with the quantifier exists^j (j not 1). Such a CSP is already NP-hard on non-bipartite graph templates. We explore the situation of this generalised CSP on bipartite templates, giving various conditions for both tractability and hardness -- culminating in a classification theorem for general graphs. Finally, we use counting quantifiers to solve the complexity of a concrete QCSP whose complexity was previously open

Area Decay Law Implementation for Quark String Fragmentation

We apply the Area Decay Law (ADL) straightforwardly to simulate a quark string hadronization and compare the results with the explicit analytic calculations. We show that the usual "inclusive" Monte--Carlo simulations do not correspond to the ADL because of two mistakes: not proper simulation of two--dimensional probability density and lack of an important combinatorial factor in a binary tree simulation. We also show how to simulate area decay law "inclusively" avoiding the above--mentioned mistakes.Comment: 5 pages (REVTEX) + 3 figures (available in ps format from G.G.Leptoukh , IPGAS-HE/93-3, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Welfare and Homelessness in Indianapolis: Populations at Risk and Barriers to Self-Sufficiency, Indianapolis

Who are the homeless in Indianapolis? How has welfare reform affected Indianapolis families who rely on public support? What barriers are preventing these populations from becoming self-sufficient? Two recent studies help answer these questions for policymakers and service providers. This issue brief summarizes the studies’ demographic findings, and the problems that erect barriers to self-sufficiency among the poor in Indianapolis