Gender, risk and the Wall Street alpha male

From the outset, analyses of the 2008 financial crisis, in mainstream as well as feminist discussions, have been gendered. In particular, rampant risk taking in an unregulated environment, widely deemed to be a principle cause of the crash, has been associated with masculine characteristics. In this article I explore how the concepts of gender and risk entwine in two films on the financial crisis – The Other Guys and Margin Call. By looking at how gender is used to dramatise financial risk, I explore how understandings of high risk behaviour are gendered, and the implications this has in the context of finance. Fictional representations mediate public understanding of this notoriously complex field, as the number of films and documentaries on the crisis demonstrates. Exploring how gender is used to communicate risk reminds us that risk taking is part of a performance of masculinity that needs to be established by constructing a feminine, risk-averse other. The contention of this paper is that to address gender bias in finance and the economy, gendered meanings of risk need to be openly challenged, and cultural and material analyses of gendered inequality brought into dialogue

Transitional Justice in a Transnational World: The Ambiguous Role of Law

In situations of military, political or economic transition, the reassessment of the role of law in the transition process becomes a crucial site of a people\u27s or a nation\u27s negotiating the past, present and future. Allusions to a tabula rasa or an annee zero after traumatic collapses of societal order, however, turn into ill-fated attempts to address the challenges of confronting the past when building the future. The law\u27s concern with nations that struggle with transition expresses itself through hybrid concepts such as transitional or post-conflict justice, restorative justice, or reconciliation. This paper revisits these instantiations and places them in the context of an increasingly transnational discourse on transitional justice. In light of the wealth of law and non-law responses to past injustice around the world today, transitional justice emerges as a form of transnational legal pluralism, highlighting the parallels of regulatory challenges confronting transition and established regimes alike

The effects of aging of scientists on their publication and citation patterns

The average age at which U.S. researchers get their first grant from NIH has increased from 34.3 in 1970, to 41.7 in 2004. These data raise the crucial question of the effects of aging on the scientific creativity and productivity of researchers. Those who worry about the aging of scientists usually believe that the younger they are the more creative and productive they will be. Using a large population of 13,680 university professors in Quebec, we show that, while scientific productivity rises sharply between 28 and 40, it increases at a slower pace between 41 and 50 and stabilizes afterward until retirement for the most active researchers. The average scientific impact per paper decreases linearly until 50-55 years old, but the average number of papers in highly cited journals and among highly cited papers rises continuously until retirement. Our results clearly show for the first time the natural history of the scientific productivity of scientists over their entire career and bring to light the fact that researchers over 55 still contribute significantly to the scientific community by producing high impact papers.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Energy distribution of the ion pairs produced in the collisional dissociation of H/sub 2//sup +/

The energy distribution and cross sections of ion pairs produced in the collision of H/sub 2//sup +/ with Xe or Kr at 6 keV incident energy have been measured. The ions produced are detected in coincidence. The energy distribution is quite narrow, which suggests that the ion pair formation is a two step process, in which the first step is electron capture.Anglai