Seeing the Old Lady: A New Perspective on the Age Old Problems of Discrimination, Inequality, and Subordination

In recent years, legal scholars have used insights from cognitive and social psychology to explain that, despite significant gains, discrimination persists in America. Specifically, such scholars argue that our current antidiscrimination legal system, aimed at overt, conscious, and intentional conduct is not an effective tool for combating current forms of discrimination that are often subtle, unconscious, and unintentional. This article builds on that work by illustrating that, while insightful, the perspective from which these scholars approach the problem of discrimination is really no different from that which informs the current antidiscrimination system they seek to change. Accordingly, this article will explain how the perspective of these scholars is the same as that informing the current system. Second, this article will put forth an alternative perspective and then demonstrate how the new point of view advocated for opens up new possibilities with respect to how we might eradicate discrimination from American society

Narrowing the Accountability Gap: Toward a New Foreign Investor Accountability Mechanism

An ever-increasing number of standards, guidelines, principles, norms, and best practices have been adopted to address the environmental and social impacts of multinational enterprises (MNEs). This increase in standards and norms corresponds to a rise in MNE sensitivity to the environmental and social impacts that their activities have on local communities in developing countries. These standards and norms are considered voluntary by definition because they are typically not state-sponsored or the product of public regulation. They fill a normative gap located between the state-centered focus of international law and the often inadequate or unenforced standards of the developing country hosts for MNE activities, but relatively little attention has been paid to mechanisms for ensuring compliance with them. This article proposes a new Foreign Investor Accountability Mechanism (“the Mechanism”). The Mechanism will narrow the accountability gap by providing communities affected by foreign investment projects with an avenue for voicing their concerns and for holding MNEs accountable both to local and national laws that may apply. The Mechanism will also allow affected communities to enforce the various promises that MNEs make during project design, approval, and preconstruction phases, or to gain financing or the ‘social license to operate.’ These promises may include: commitments to follow international, industry-wide, or sectoral standards and norms; commitments made as part of corporate-wide social and environmental policies; and project-specific commitments made to secure host government approval or financing from financial institutions, such as the International Finance Corporation, export credit agencies, or private commercial banks

Narrowing the Accountability Gap: Toward a New Foreign Investor Accountability Mechanism

An ever-increasing number of standards, guidelines, principles, norms, and best practices have been adopted to address the environmental and social impacts of multinational enterprises (MNEs). This increase in standards and norms corresponds to a rise in MNE sensitivity to the environmental and social impacts that their activities have on local communities in developing countries. These standards and norms are considered voluntary by definition because they are typically not state-sponsored or the product of public regulation. They fill a normative gap located between the state-centered focus of international law and the often inadequate or unenforced standards of the developing country hosts for MNE activities, but relatively little attention has been paid to mechanisms for ensuring compliance with them. This article proposes a new Foreign Investor Accountability Mechanism (“the Mechanism”). The Mechanism will narrow the accountability gap by providing communities affected by foreign investment projects with an avenue for voicing their concerns and for holding MNEs accountable both to local and national laws that may apply. The Mechanism will also allow affected communities to enforce the various promises that MNEs make during project design, approval, and preconstruction phases, or to gain financing or the ‘social license to operate.’ These promises may include: commitments to follow international, industry-wide, or sectoral standards and norms; commitments made as part of corporate-wide social and environmental policies; and project-specific commitments made to secure host government approval or financing from financial institutions, such as the International Finance Corporation, export credit agencies, or private commercial banks

Correlation Between Student Collaboration Network Centrality and Academic Performance

We compute nodal centrality measures on the collaboration networks of students enrolled in three upper-division physics courses, usually taken sequentially, at the Colorado School of Mines. These are complex networks in which links between students indicate assistance with homework. The courses included in the study are intermediate Classical Mechanics, introductory Quantum Mechanics, and intermediate Electromagnetism. By correlating these nodal centrality measures with students' scores on homework and exams, we find four centrality measures that correlate significantly with students' homework scores in all three courses: in-strength, out-strength, closeness centrality, and harmonic centrality. These correlations suggest that students who not only collaborate often, but also collaborate significantly with many different people tend to achieve higher grades. Centrality measures between simultaneous collaboration networks (analytical vs. numerical homework collaboration) composed of the same students also correlate with each other, suggesting that students' collaboration strategies remain relatively stable when presented with homework assignments targeting different skills. Additionally, we correlate centrality measures between collaboration networks from different courses and find that the four centrality measures with the strongest relationship to students' homework scores are also the most stable measures across networks involving different courses. Correlations of centrality measures with exam scores were generally smaller than the correlations with homework scores, though this finding varied across courses.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. PE

Automatic correction of hand pointing in stereoscopic depth

In order to examine whether stereoscopic depth information could drive fast automatic correction of hand pointing, an experiment was designed in a 3D visual environment in which participants were asked to point to a target at different stereoscopic depths as quickly and accurately as possible within a limited time window (≤300 ms). The experiment consisted of two tasks: "depthGO" in which participants were asked to point to the new target position if the target jumped, and "depthSTOP" in which participants were instructed to abort their ongoing movements after the target jumped. The depth jump was designed to occur in 20% of the trials in both tasks. Results showed that fast automatic correction of hand movements could be driven by stereoscopic depth to occur in as early as 190 ms.This work was supported by the Grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (60970062 and 61173116) and the Doctoral Fund of Ministry of Education of China (20110072110014)

The initiator methionine tRNA drives secretion of type II collagen from stromal fibroblasts to promote tumor growth and angiogenesis

Summary: Expression of the initiator methionine tRNA (tRNAi Met) is deregulated in cancer. Despite this fact, it is not currently known how tRNAi Met expression levels influence tumor progression. We have found that tRNAi Met expression is increased in carcinoma-associated fibroblasts, implicating deregulated expression of tRNAi Met in the tumor stroma as a possible contributor to tumor progression. To investigate how elevated stromal tRNAi Met contributes to tumor progression, we generated a mouse expressing additional copies of the tRNAi Met gene (2+tRNAi Met mouse). Growth and vascularization of subcutaneous tumor allografts was enhanced in 2+tRNAi Met mice compared with wild-type littermate controls. Extracellular matrix (ECM) deposited by fibroblasts from 2+tRNAi Met mice supported enhanced endothelial cell and fibroblast migration. SILAC mass spectrometry indicated that elevated expression of tRNAi Met significantly increased synthesis and secretion of certain types of collagen, in particular type II collagen. Suppression of type II collagen opposed the ability of tRNAi Metoverexpressing fibroblasts to deposit pro-migratory ECM. We used the prolyl hydroxylase inhibitor ethyl- 3,4-dihydroxybenzoate (DHB) to determine whether collagen synthesis contributes to the tRNAi Met-driven pro-tumorigenic stroma in vivo. DHB had no effect on the growth of syngeneic allografts in wild-type mice but opposed the ability of 2+tRNAi Met mice to support increased angiogenesis and tumor growth. Finally, collagen II expression predicts poor prognosis in high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma. Taken together, these data indicate that increased tRNAi Met levels contribute to tumor progression by enhancing the ability of stromal fibroblasts to synthesize and secrete a type II collagen-rich ECM that supports endothelial cell migration and angiogenesis