Signs Written upon the Water: On Some Representations of the Great Lakes as Inland Seas

There are more than thirty nuclear reactors in the Great Lakes Basin, many of which are on the shores of the lakes: most of them are of the same type and of the same vintage as the Westinghouse cooled-water reactor at Fukushima; they are built close to the lakes in order to use the water to cool their radioactive cores. This paper emphasizes the necessity of considering the cultural and political histories of the lands and waters of the Great Lakes in terms of the purposes to which the Great Lakes Basin was put by the colonizing powers from the times of Verrazzano, Cartier, and Champlain down to the present. It also underlines the degree to which the political boundaries of nations, provinces and states meander, and cut through geological spaces that know no such divisions

The Mismatch Myth in U.S. Higher Education: A Synthesis of the Empirical Evidence at the Law School and Undergraduate Levels

Opponents of affirmative action in higher education commonly cite two principles to justify their opposition. One is that admissions to institutions of higher education should be based on merit, which is often treated by critics of affirmative action as consisting of little more than test score results and high school or undergraduate grades. The second is the legal and moral imperative of not making consequential decisions based on race. We shall not address these principles except to note that others have shown that they do not make the case against affirmative action (Carbado & Harris 2008, Shultz & Zedeck 2011, Prager 2003, Krieger & Fiske 2006, Kang & Banaji 2006, Kang 2012) and to suggest that the weaknesses of arguments derived from these principles are an important reason for the empirical effort to suggest that affirmative action hurts rather than helps its intended beneficiaries, the claim this paper reviews. If these claims were correct it would not matter if the legal and moral case against affirmative action is built on sand, which is perhaps why some leading critics of affirmative action seek to bolster their constitutional and moral critiques with empirical claims (e.g., Thernstrom & Thernstrom 2012a, 2012b)

Affirmative Action in American Law Schools: A Critical Response to Richard Sander\u27s A Reply to Critics

Richard Sander’s Stanford Law Review article, “A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” has generated considerable attention and criticism. This included a critical essay in the May 2005 Stanford Law Review by the four of us, as well as others in the same issue by Professors Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks, Michele Landis Dauber, and David Wilkins. Sander’s “A Reply to Critics” also appeared in the same issue. For those following this empirical debate about the costs and benefits of affirmative action, we provide this working paper as a response to Sander’s “A Reply to Critics.” We show the weaknesses in the logic that underlies many of Sander’s assumptions and arguments and show that his reply does not salvage the case against affirmative action that he claimed to have made in his Stanford article. Rather, Sander’s reply explicitly or implicitly repudiates much of the methodology and many of the claims he made in “Systemic Analysis,” even as he clings firmly to its conclusion and compounds earlier analytic mistakes with new ones

The Real Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in American Law Schools: An Empirical Critique of Richard Sander\u27s Study

In 1970, there were about 4000 African American lawyers in the United States. Today there are more than 40,000. The great majority of the 40,000 have attended schools that were once nearly all-white, and most were the beneficiaries of affirmative action in their admission to law school. American law schools and the American bar can justly take pride in the achievements of affirmative action: the training of tens of thousands of African American (as well as Latino, Asian American, and Native American) practitioners, community leaders, judges, and law professors; the integration of the American bar; the services that minority attorneys have provided to minority individuals and organizations once poorly serviced by white lawyers; and the educational benefits that law students of all backgrounds derive from studying in a racially diverse environment. But not every student admitted through affirmative action realizes his or her ambition to practice law. Of the African American students who entered law school in the fall of 1991, the one year for which we have good data, about 43% either did not graduate or graduated but had not passed a bar exam within two years of graduation. Only 17% of the white students in the 1991 cohort suffered either of these fates. In A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools (Systemic Analysis), Professor Richard Sander argues that if affirmative action were eliminated in law school admissions, the rate at which African American students fail to graduate and pass the bar would be reduced substantially without any concomitant loss in the numbers of African Americans joining the bar. He acknowledges that fewer African American students would be admitted to law school, but predicts that those who were admitted would graduate and pass the bar at much higher rates because they would no longer be attending schools where the competition was too stiff for them. Sander builds to an astonishing forecast: that the number of black lawyers produced by American law schools each year and subsequently passing the bar would probably increase if those schools collectively stopped using racial preferences. In particular, he predicts that the cohort entering law school in 2001 would have produced 7.9% more new black lawyers entering the bar.5 We agree with Sander that the high rate at which African American students fail to graduate and fail to pass the bar is alarming.6 Indeed, we take the problem so seriously that despite the high value we place on racial diversity within law schools, the four of us would not support affirmative action as currently practiced in law school admissions if we believed that employing race-neutral admissions criteria would in fact lead to a net increase in the number of African Americans passing the bar.7 We find, however, that while Sander has appropriately forced us and others to take a hard look at the actual workings of affirmative action, he has significantly overestimated the costs of affirmative action and failed to demonstrate benefits from ending it. The conclusions in Systemic Analysis rest on a series of statistical errors, oversights, and implausible assumptions. It is these empirical shortcomings that we address in this Response

Affirmative Action in American Law Schools: A Critical Response to Richard Sander\u27s A Reply to Critics

Richard Sander’s Stanford Law Review article, “A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” has generated considerable attention and criticism. This included a critical essay in the May 2005 Stanford Law Review by the four of us, as well as others in the same issue by Professors Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks, Michele Landis Dauber, and David Wilkins. Sander’s “A Reply to Critics” also appeared in the same issue. For those following this empirical debate about the costs and benefits of affirmative action, we provide this working paper as a response to Sander’s “A Reply to Critics.” We show the weaknesses in the logic that underlies many of Sander’s assumptions and arguments and show that his reply does not salvage the case against affirmative action that he claimed to have made in his Stanford article. Rather, Sander’s reply explicitly or implicitly repudiates much of the methodology and many of the claims he made in “Systemic Analysis,” even as he clings firmly to its conclusion and compounds earlier analytic mistakes with new ones

Modeling the source of GW150914 with targeted numerical-relativity simulations

In fall of 2015, the two LIGO detectors measured the gravitational wave signal GW150914, which originated from a pair of merging black holes. In the final 0.2 seconds (about 8 gravitational-wave cycles) before the amplitude reached its maximum, the observed signal swept up in amplitude and frequency, from 35 Hz to 150 Hz. The theoretical gravitational-wave signal for merging black holes, as predicted by general relativity, can be computed only by full numerical relativity, because analytic approximations fail near the time of merger. Moreover, the nearly-equal masses, moderate spins, and small number of orbits of GW150914 are especially straightforward and efficient to simulate with modern numerical-relativity codes. In this paper, we report the modeling of GW150914 with numerical-relativity simulations, using black-hole masses and spins consistent with those inferred from LIGO's measurement. In particular, we employ two independent numerical-relativity codes that use completely different analytical and numerical methods to model the same merging black holes and to compute the emitted gravitational waveform; we find excellent agreement between the waveforms produced by the two independent codes. These results demonstrate the validity, impact, and potential of current and future studies using rapid-response, targeted numerical-relativity simulations for better understanding gravitational-wave observations.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit

Impact of subdominant modes on the interpretation of gravitational-wave signals from heavy binary black hole systems

Over the past year, a handful of new gravitational wave models have been developed to include multiple harmonic modes thereby enabling for the first time fully Bayesian inference studies including higher modes to be performed. Using one recently developed numerical relativity surrogate model, NRHybSur3dq8, we investigate the importance of higher modes on parameter inference of coalescing massive binary black holes. We focus on examples relevant to the current three-detector network of observatories, with a detector-frame mass set to 120 M⊙ and with signal amplitude values that are consistent with plausible candidates for the next few observing runs. We show that for such systems the higher mode content will be important for interpreting coalescing binary black holes, reducing systematic bias, and computing properties of the remnant object. Even for comparable-mass binaries and at low signal amplitude, the omission of higher modes can influence posterior probability distributions. We discuss the impact of our results on source population inference and self-consistency tests of general relativity. Our work can be used to better understand asymmetric binary black hole merger events, such as GW190412. Higher modes are critical for such systems, and their omission usually produces substantial parameter biases