Divine discrimination: gender harassment and Christian justification

Gender harassment (i.e., derogatory comments or actions that express stereotypical attitudes regarding someone’s gender) is often times the most prominent form of sex-based harassment directed towards women in both workplace and academic settings. This study explored the moderating effect of Christian attribution on gender harassment predicting college adjustment for college women using a mixed-methods approach rooted in feminist theoretical perspectives. Two hundred twenty-three female-identified students attending a Catholic university in a large, urban city completed the Gender Experiences Questionnaire (GEQ), a measure designed to capture instances of sexuality policing, indicated whether they believed reported harassment was motivated by the Christian/Catholic belief of the perpetrator, and completed the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ). Additionally, participants were asked to write about their experiences of reported Christian-motivated gender harassment. Overall gender harassment negatively predicted college adjustment. Additionally, Christian attribution was found to moderate the impact of sexuality policing on college adjustment. A qualitative analysis of participants’ own descriptions of Christian-motivated gender harassment revealed that participants identified their classmates/peers as the most common perpetrator(s) of harassment and the most common cited reason for making a Christian attribution was knowing the perpetrator’s Christian/Catholic religious affiliation. Conclusions, limitations of the study, and future directions for research are discussed

Carol Anne Bond v the United States of America: How a woman scorned threatened the Chemical Weapons Convention

The case of Carol Anne Bond v the United States of America stemmed from a domestic dispute when Ms. Bond attempted to retaliate against her best friend by attacking her with chemical agents. What has emerged is a much greater issue--a test of standing on whether a private citizen can challenge the Tenth Amendment. Instead of being prosecuted in state court for assault, Ms. Bond was charged and tried in district court under a federal criminal statute passed as part of implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Ms. Bond\u27s argument rests on the claim that the statute exceeded the federal government\u27s enumerated powers in criminalizing her behavior and violated the Constitution, while the government contends legislation implementing treaty obligations is well within its purview. This question remains unanswered because there is dispute among the lower courts as to whether Ms. Bond, as a citizen, even has the right to challenge an amendment guaranteeing states rights when a state is not a party to the action. The Supreme Court heard the case on February 22, 2011, and, if it decides to grant Ms. Bond standing to challenge her conviction, the case will be returned to the lower courts. Should the court decide Ms. Bond has the standing to challenge her conviction and further questions the constitutionality of the law, it would be a significant blow to implementation of the CWC in the U.S. and the effort of the federal government to ensure we are meeting our international obligations

Coherent imaging of extended objects

When used with coherent light, optical imaging systems, even diffraction-limited, are inherently unable to reproduce both the amplitude and the phase of a two-dimensional field distribution because their impulse response function varies slowly from point to point (a property known as non-isoplanatism). For sufficiently small objects, this usually results in a phase distortion and has no impact on the measured intensity. Here, we show that the intensity distribution can also be dramatically distorted when objects of large extension or of special shapes are imaged. We illustrate the problem using two simple examples: the pinhole camera and the aberration-free thin lens. The effects predicted by our theorical analysis are also confirmed by experimental observations.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Optics Communication

Palladium(II)-Catalysed Aminocarbonylation of Terminal Alkynes for the Synthesis of 2-Ynamides: Addressing the Challenges of Solvents and Gas Mixtures

2‐Ynamides can be synthesised through Pd(II) catalysed oxidative carbonylation, utilising low catalyst loadings. A variety of alkynes and amines can be used to afford 2‐ynamides in high yields, whilst overcoming the drawbacks associated with previous oxidative methods, which rely on dangerous solvents and gas mixtures. The use of [NBu(4)]I allows the utilisation of the industrially recommended solvent ethyl acetate. O(2) can be used as the terminal oxidant, and the catalyst can operate under safer conditions with low O(2) concentrations

Evaluation of a Conversation Management Toolkit for Multi Agent Programming

The Agent Conversation Reasoning Engine (ACRE) is intended to aid agent developers to improve the management and reliability of agent communication. To evaluate its effectiveness, a problem scenario was created that could be used to compare code written with and without the use of ACRE by groups of test subjects. This paper describes the requirements that the evaluation scenario was intended to meet and how these motivated the design of the problem. Two experiments were conducted with two separate sets of students and their solutions were analysed using a combination of simple objective metrics and subjective analysis. The analysis suggested that ACRE by default prevents some common problems arising that would limit the reliability and extensibility of conversation-handling code. As ACRE has to date been integrated only with the Agent Factory multi agent framework, it was necessary to verify that the problems identified are not unique to that platform. Thus a comparison was made with best practice communication code written for the Jason platform, in order to demonstrate the wider applicability of a system such as ACRE.Comment: appears as Programming Multi-Agent Systems - 10th International Workshop, ProMAS 2012, Valencia, Spain, June 5, 2012, Revised Selected Paper